Sorrow Bound (38 page)

When Angelo returned, it was clear something had changed. He just didn’t have it in him. Didn’t have the strength to kill. He saw the people on his list as innocents. They didn’t know what they were doing. They’d made a mistake but didn’t deserve to die. The fight went out of him. He began to take more drugs. He closed down. Stopped talking. Wouldn’t play with their daughter. Wouldn’t come out of his room.

A month ago, Angelo took his own life. He parked their blue van in a lock-up they had rented. Turned on the engine and opened the windows. Breathed in blue smoke until his lungs gave out and his eyes closed.

He couldn’t have known
, Gary told himself, when he found the bodies.
Couldn’t have known their daughter was in the back. She just climbed in. Snuggled down in a place she felt comfortable. Angelo couldn’t have seen her. The fumes would have reached her first as she lay with her toys in the back. She’d have slipped away as if to sleep. Angelo would never have known, as he sat and waited to die in the front seat, that their daughter was dead
.

Until then, Gary had been Nick Peace. He’d found that peaceful place, within him and without. He’d begun to imagine a future. He’d stopped listening to his blood. As he found the bodies of his friend and their child, he felt himself drifting out of himself in a way he had not done for years. And his blood told him what to do next.

Told him that Angelo was another victim of Hoyer-Wood.

Told him his daughter was too.

Told him they needed to be avenged.

He couldn’t bring himself to get rid of the bodies. Drove around with them in the van, even when the stench made him feel sick.

It hadn’t been difficult to find the do-gooders who had spoiled all of their lives. Philippa Longman. Yvonne Dale. Allan Godber. Hadn’t been hard to get to know them. He was an odd-job man, after all, a contractor. He’d fixed Philippa’s railings. Yvonne’s roof. Done some pointing work at Allan’s place. Got to know them. Became invisible. Peered into their lives as he planned their deaths.

Philippa had been the hardest. Despite what she cost him, she had seemed a nice lady. She’d given him a big smile that night as she spotted him on the street on her walk home from work. Chatted to him about the weather and her grandkids and told him he’d done a grand job on her railings. But Gary’s blood wasn‘t listening, and Gary hadn’t returned to himself until Philippa was dead on the ground with her chest caved in.

It had been the same the next time. Yvonne had died quietly but there had been more blood than he expected.

But he’d made a prat of himself with Allan’s death. The defibrillator had been too fucking complicated. Had shown him up. Gary never left his skin that time. Stayed very much awake as he battered the former paramedic to death on the cold floor of the lock-up.

As he looks at Dr Pradesh, he wonders how much of today’s work he will actually experience, and how much he will simply watch.

The surgeon is still blubbering. She’s got one of Olivia’s fluffy toys wedged in her gob and it’s turning pink. She’s bleeding from the mouth. He can’t remember if he punched her in the stomach or not. He wonders if she might have internal bleeding, or has just bitten through her cheek.

He rolls off the table. Brushes himself down.

Looks around.

Gary likes this place. It’s a ruin now. There are holes in the roof and the bare brick walls are surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The remaining internal walls are smoke-blackened and the carpet has turned into something organic and squelchy beneath a covering of lime-tree sap and leaves. Still, it has character. It’s quiet. And he likes knowing that Angelo had, for a time, been happy here. He can feel him nearby.

Gary shed a tear this morning when he realised he had lost his friend’s body. He blames Dr Pradesh. Blames her for a lot of things. The woman on the table saved Hoyer-Wood’s life. She opened him up and stopped the bleeding. Stitched his spleen back together. Repaired a laceration to his kidney. She’s going to learn how that feels. And then she’s going to bleed into her own exposed abdomen until she drowns and dies.

Gary pushes his hair back from his face. He’s a little hungry. In one corner of the room are a few empty tins. He’s been living on cold beans and spaghetti. Been kipping in his van some nights and lying here, looking through the holes in the roof, on the nights he knows the security guards won’t be patrolling.

It had been more luck than design that he’d landed the job of looking after the mansion house. He’d driven up purely to see the place for himself, having heard Angelo’s descriptions so many times without ever laying eyes on it. He’d been parking
up on the gravel when a load of posh blokes in suits and accents had walked out, looking over blueprints and chattering excitedly about their big plans. They’d approached him and said something about serendipity and needing somebody to keep an eye on the place. They’d hired him on the spot to keep the place clean and tidy. Given him a business card, and told him to email his details across. Agreed to pay him cash in hand. It had felt like somebody was smiling on him.

Angelo had still been alive then. But he wasn’t communicating much. Wasn’t coming out of his room. Gary didn’t even really trust him to be left alone with Olivia. He’d taken to bringing her with him everywhere. She’d sit and chatter and play with her toys in the back of the van. She liked it in there. It was warm and dry and smelled of Daddy.

He couldn’t have known …

Gary looks down at Dr Pradesh. The light isn’t very good and her face is only illuminated when the lightning flashes. She’s quite pretty, and her body is in good shape. She even has a little heart-shaped tattoo where her pubes should be. He’d expected more from a surgeon.

Gary looks into Dr Pradesh’s eyes. Sees himself reflected in them. Realises he’s forgotten the mask. He stole one from a dental practice a few weeks ago, along with some latex gloves and a fistful of scalpels and scrapers. He wants to do this right. To get it as close to perfection as possible. He hopes the doctor doesn’t think that he’s stripped her for any perverted reasons. He would like to put her in a surgical gown, but he doesn’t have one, and feels uncomfortable using this old pine table to operate on instead of a gleaming, cold slab of steel. But he has to make do.

Gary tears his gaze away and looks up at the sky. The rain
patters onto his face and he closes his eyes to enjoy the sensation. When he opens them again, the jackdaw in the sky is staring again. A black pupil is turned upon him. He realises he has an audience. That time is precious and Dr Pradesh has already been alive too long. At some point, he’ll be caught. He’s already been stupid enough to give a name to those two coppers who turned up last week. He was trying too hard. Trying to be too friendly. Plucked a name from the air that could be exposed as bullshit with a phone call. He’d wanted to seem helpful so they didn’t sniff too hard and breathe in the rotting corpses in his van. He’d phoned security the second he’d got away from them, but they both seemed pretty bright and he knows that he has a limited amount of time left before they begin joining the dots. Before they catch him, he has more work to do. There are the nurses who tended to Hoyer-Wood after his operation. There are those who helped him with his rehabilitation. It struck him recently just how incomplete Angelo’s list had been. So many more people could be justifiably killed. He intends to right that wrong …

Feet squelching on the carpet and the dirt, Angelo crosses to the back door of the derelict property. His mask is in the van, parked behind the screen of lime trees. The scalpel that will be used to open Dr Pradesh’s belly is in his pocket. He hadn’t been able to purchase the surgical rib-spreader he had wanted but he has a hydraulic foot-pump in the vehicle that should do a similar job in splitting her ribs and allowing him the freedom to poke around inside her with his blade.

He takes the door with both hands. The wood has expanded over the years and sticks on the uneven floor. He yanks it hard and steps out into the darkened day, rain turning the ground
beneath him into a swamp of mud and standing water, its surface bouncing and rippling beneath the deluge.

Gary pushes aside the sagging fence and ducks under the dangling barbed wire. His work boots sink into the soft earth and he feels water up to his shins. Carefully, he pulls one foot free, then the other, and manages to slurp his way onto harder ground. The van is only a few feet away.

A sheet of lightning rolls across the blackness and for an instant the scene before him is illuminated.

A big, broad-shouldered man is climbing out of the back of his van.

He’s holding the decaying body of Olivia in his arms.

Gary’s blood takes over.

He takes the scalpel in his fist. He throws his head back.

Feels the jackdaw’s eye upon him.

The flash of recognition is lost in his rage. Even as he realises that the man who holds his daughter is the policeman who spoke to him a few days ago, the knowledge is swept away on a tide of angry blood.

He runs forward.

And sticks the blade in the big man’s back.

*

McAvoy doesn’t hear Gary Reeves approach.

The thunder and the driving rain mask the sound of footsteps on sodden earth and it is only as pain rips down his spine that he realises he is in danger.

He pitches forward. His first thought is not for himself. He just doesn’t want to drop the dead girl who he holds in his arms as if rocking her to sleep.

McAvoy places the little girl on the hard floor of the van. Only then does he turn.

Steel flashes past his face. He jerks his head back just as it whistles past his cheek, then does so again as the screeching, howling features of Gary Reeves are lit by another flash of lightning.

McAvoy feels the van at his back. Tries to find somewhere solid to put his feet and looks down for the briefest of instants. It is long enough for Reeves to lunge with the knife again and McAvoy sucks in a gasp of agony as the blade digs into his hip.

He pushes hard with both hands, sending Reeves back and onto his arse. McAvoy looks down, expecting the weapon to still be stuck in him, but there is nothing there save a spreading patch of warmth. He looks back up and sees Reeves pulling himself back to his feet. The blade is still in his hands. McAvoy scrabbles in his jacket pocket for his extendable baton but Reeves runs at him again. Savagely, the smaller man stabs and stabs again, opening wounds in McAvoy’s arms as he throws his hands up to protect himself. There is suddenly warm wetness upon his face and his vision turns red as the scalpel slices down to the bone above his eye.

In desperation, McAvoy grabs Reeves around the middle, shouting out as the blade sticks in his left bicep and stays there. They go down together, splashing to the ground in a spray of mud and blood and dirty rain.

Reeves slithers free and kicks out, the steel toe of his boot catching McAvoy in the throat. McAvoy raises his hands to his windpipe, gasping for breath, and suddenly Reeves is on him, kicking his hands away and forcing his head down into the great puddle of rain and leaves.

His mouth and nose are suddenly full of mud and water. He
can’t see. Can’t speak. Can feel only cold pain in his lungs and the weight of Gary Reeves upon his neck, holding his head below the surface.

McAvoy tries to push himself back but the ground is too slippery and his hands give way, forcing him deeper under the water. The sound of the storm dissipates and he realises his ears are under water too. His lungs feel as though they are bursting. His face is agony.

Despite himself, his mouth opens and filthy rainwater fills him.

Lights dance in his vision. He feels himself growing weak. Feels his limbs shake.

Sees, for the briefest of moments, Roisin’s face, picked out like a constellation in the dancing stars of the fading darkness.

McAvoy reaches under himself. Through the dirt and the leaves and the swirling water, his hand closes on the scalpel that sticks in his left arm.

In one movement, he pulls it free and stabs, weakly, desperately at the man on his back.

He feels the blade hit home. Feels a momentary loosening of pressure.

McAvoy throws himself backwards, gasping for air, eyes opening into the rain and the storm.

Gary Reeves is a few feet away, pulling the scalpel from his collarbone. His fingers are slick with the blood and his hair hangs forward across his features. It’s black, like a jackdaw’s wing over his eyes.

McAvoy puts his whole weight into the punch. Throws it while staggering forward in a half-run.

His right hand connects with Gary Reeves’s jaw. McAvoy feels a knuckle break with the impact. Then his feet slip out from
under him and he lands on top of the unconscious man, a wave of brown water rolling away from their entwined limbs to break against the chicken wire and brick of Tilia Cottage.

Drowsily, feebly, McAvoy gets back to his feet. He staggers a little and presses a hand to the wound at his hip. He feels the warmth of fresh blood, but keeps his footing long enough to cross the grass and stumble through the lime trees to his car. In the glovebox he finds the tie-wrap cuffs he should have had in his pocket. He takes them in his blood-soaked fist and slithers his way back to where Reeves lies. He’s half submerged in a puddle, and his jaw hangs slack to one side. McAvoy tries to stop his hands from shaking and slips the cuffs around Reeves’s wrists. He drags him clear of the rising puddle, then climbs back to his feet.

He almost falls: his progress across the grass is that of a man trying to stay on his feet on the deck of a boat in a force nine gale.

He ducks under the barbed wire. Pulls open the door.

Sees
.

Dr Pradesh.

Naked.

Bleeding.

Alive
.

He crosses to her quietly. Begins untying the blue ropes that lash her to the table.

Blood-soaked and mud-spattered, he knows he looks terrifying and fearsome. He talks to her as he would to a startled horse.

Locks eyes with her for a moment.