The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (35 page)

‘When will it be over?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Soon.’

‘And you didn’t fancy tagging along?’

‘I decided not to,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘I couldn’t help them. You were right. I was of no use to them. They didn’t need me. And I decided I wanted to come home to you.’

Eileen stared at him.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at her, finally. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you deserved that.’

She continued staring at him. The sadness on his face hadn’t gone away, and she knew full well that he was lying to her – at least in part. He’d wanted to go, she decided, and they had, predictably and understandably, turned him down. And now he was trying to salvage the situation and make the best of it. Cast it in a flattering light.

Oh John
, she thought.

For a moment, she didn’t know what to say to him.

And then ...

‘Sit with me,’ she said. ‘Let’s just sit together for a while.’

She held out her hand to him. He stared at it. And then, after a moment, he reached out and took it, and he did.

Cane Hill

We left the department in a convoy.

Pete drove the front vehicle, with me in the passenger seat beside him and Greg sitting behind, working on his computer as we went. Glancing in the side mirror, I could see three vans behind us. Eighteen officers following in our wake.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been glad of their presence. While I had no idea exactly what we would find when we reached Cane Hill, I suspected it would be bad, and I should have been pleased we were going to have as many feet on the ground as we would. But it also made me uneasy. The department’s door team had been seconded to join us, which meant that Sasha was in one of those vans. She would be heading into the unknown with us.

Worry about yourself, Mark. She knows what she’s doing
.

Which was true, but for some reason it didn’t help. As we approached the outskirts of the city, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

Outside the vehicle, the late afternoon had darkened. It remained stiflingly warm, but there was an edge to the air now, and the sky ahead of us was full of boiling swirls of grey-black cloud. At ground level, everything seemed shadowed and dull, as though evening had already fallen.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Pete said.

Focus, Mark
.

I turned my attention back to the tablet in my lap.

Cane Hill Hospital. When I’d scanned through the history available online back in the office, it had felt obvious that it was the place we were looking for. I read the page again now.

The hospital was situated about ten miles east of the city, a short distance into the woods that stretched across the countryside there. The main building had been constructed in the 1880s, on land belonging to a man named William Cane. Cane had come from a family of rail entrepreneurs. He was very rich, and also well known for his philanthropy. He’d paid for the construction of the psychiatric hospital himself, then run it on a charitable basis. It had never been a large facility. At the height of its use, it accommodated fewer than fifty patients.

The property had passed to his grandson, George, in 1941. George Cane had the top floor of the main building converted and lived there with his wife, Melissa. Their twin sons, Joseph and Jonathan, were born in 1953. Following the war, the lower floors had continued to be used for psychiatric services, principally for traumatised soldiers, but over the decades that followed, the property’s use as a hospital began to steadily diminish. The family remained.

The twins were home-schooled by Melissa, who was an intensely religious woman, said to give sermons to the patients in the hospital’s chapel. However, there were intimations that her mental health deteriorated over the years, and that the sermons became muddled and unintelligible. An undisclosed event in 1961 resulted in her being cared for by her sons on the top floor of the hospital.

George Cane died in 1969, when the twins would have been sixteen years old, and the hospital closed two years later. Gordon Peters had been one of the last patients, while still a teenager himself. The place seemed to have disappeared from people’s memories. It was small and specialised enough, and
sufficiently distant from the city proper, that many had forgotten its existence even before its closure.

I checked through again. There was no mention of a Nicholas Cane. No date given for Melissa Cane’s death either.

I wondered about that
undisclosed event
, though. Reading between the lines, it suggested a breakdown or even a suicide attempt, after which she had effectively been confined in the hospital. Joseph and Jonathan would have been eight years old when they started looking after her, and so I also wondered what further lessons they might have learned at their disturbed mother’s bedside. There was no information about what had happened afterwards. It seemed to be assumed that Cane Hill Hospital had been vacant since its closure, although there was nothing as to what had become of the twins afterwards, or where they had gone. They would be in their early sixties now, so it was more than possible that they, at least, were still alive.

It was even possible, I thought, that they were still there: that they had never left Cane Hill. And that they weren’t alone. That for reasons I still couldn’t entirely fathom, David Groves was with them too.

Merritt watched David Groves standing upright in the corner of his small cell. Sleeping, apparently. It amazed him what people could grow accustomed to, even if they didn’t have any choice. In his time as a soldier, he’d endured terrible things too, but that had been such a long time ago now that it was hard to recall; his life had been one of relative comfort for years, running security and research and administration here at Cane Hill. And of course, as complicated as things could be, he had at least
chosen
to be a soldier to begin with. Whatever discomforts and agonies he’d suffered all that time ago, on some level he’d deserved them. He’d at least signed up for it.

That wasn’t true of David Groves.

Merritt had been involved in everything that had happened to the man, and those connected to him. He had been complicit in destroying his life, framing him and bringing him here two
years ago. And just as with the other men and women he’d abducted, he knew exactly what Groves had done to deserve this.

Nothing.

He was simply a good man.

He also knew what lay in store for Groves over the next few hours.
God help you
, he thought, even though he was no believer, and once again he felt that strange surge of pity.

Guilt, however, was an emotion beyond him.

Merritt had spent the last hour emptying out Hell: working his way methodically through the cells and dragging the occupants into the corridors, and then out into the open air. They had wailed and screeched like animals, but it was done now, and the place was silent.

With one last glance at David Groves – still sleeping – Merritt turned and made his way back through the corridors, heading for daylight, passing open cell after open cell. With the exception of its one remaining prisoner, Hell was now empty.

The rain hit him again as he walked out of the church. Down the hill in front of him, he could see the handful of sinners, naked and chained to the trees. The air and the rain and the last ebbs of gloomy daylight must have been a shock to them. A few more hours of suffering, then. Nothing new to them – not in itself. He walked past them, ignoring the screeching.

As he crossed the clearing, he reached the man in the centre: his latest addition to the collection at the Cane Hill compound, Paul Carlisle was naked, his hands cuffed together in front of him, chained to a post that had been driven into the ground. The man was on his knees in the mud, his head bowed. Merritt could see Carlisle’s rain-wet back shuddering, and hear him whispering.

‘Please,’ he was saying. ‘Please.’

Merritt ignored him. He knew what Paul Carlisle had done, him and his group of friends, and he doubted
please
had ever done much to help their victims. Merritt had killed each of the
others himself, and his only real regret was that he wouldn’t necessarily get to kill Carlisle as well.

At the back of the main hospital building, he spotted Cane, an older man in a black suit, and made his way across. Cane was staring at the clearing and didn’t seem to notice Merritt approaching until he was beside him.

‘Sir.’

‘Mr Merritt.’ Cane shook his head. ‘Are we ready?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. You know what to do next.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He felt an urge to add something – he knew what this meant to the man: that Cane saw it as settling the lifelong conflict with his
brother
once and for all – but couldn’t find the words. Instead, he moved back down the patio until he reached the boy, who was standing with the baby in his arms. Jamie Groves and Ella Matheson. It only really mattered about removing Jamie from the scene – for now – but Merritt knew he wouldn’t allow himself to be separated from the baby. He had been caring for it since its mother had left. Merritt put a hand on the boy’s arm.

‘What is our Father doing?’ Jamie asked. ‘Who is that man?’

Merritt did his best to smile.

‘Please come with me,’ he said.

Ten minutes.

‘Mark,’ Greg said. ‘I’m sending you a map through now.’

The notification flashed up on my tablet screen.

‘Got it.’

When I opened it, I was greeted by an overhead satellite map of the area we were heading towards. The main road we were on was obvious, curling along the bottom of the screen, with what appeared to be a thin driveway about a kilometre long snaking up through the woods towards the compound itself. The remains of the hospital looked like some abandoned outpost. The grounds were roughly circular, with the main building a grey shape that bisected the area horizontally, the
edges lost amongst the green at either side. A second structure, much smaller than the hospital itself, was set further back, closest to the depths of the woods. The land around it seemed slightly shaded and odd.

‘The little one,’ I said. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘I don’t know,’ Greg said. ‘It’s elevated, though – up on some kind of hill.’

The chapel
, I thought, where Melissa Cane had given her sermons. Looking at it onscreen, I thought it seemed older than the main building. While it was impossible to make out any real detail, I had the sensation that I was staring at some ancient structure.

I closed down the map for a moment and began to search online for more information about the grounds, working through variations of
Cane Hill
and
hospital
and
church
. The movement of the car made it hard to type properly, but a few moments later, I was rewarded with a screen full of results. Most were unrelated, but one close to the top of the page was relevant.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something here on an urban exploration site.’

‘A what?’ Pete said.

‘Urban exploration,’ Greg said. ‘Bunches of people who go looking round abandoned buildings. Housing projects and railways and hospitals and things.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘They explore. They take photographs.’

‘That sounds like the sort of pointless activity you’d know all about.’

I tuned their conversation out as the site finished loading, and then began to read. It was a thread in a forum, only a few pages long, and it was from a few years ago. The initial posts implied that Cane Hill was a little-known but desirable target, and yet the handful of expeditions that had attempted to gain access had met with scant success.

‘There’s security there,’ I said. ‘The groups that have tried to
get in found a gate on the road in, and some kind of fence that runs off from that into the woods on either side.’

‘All the way round?’ Pete said.

‘It doesn’t say. It looks like they tried to follow it a little way into the trees, but the ground got too difficult for them.’

I kept reading.

‘Another group tried coming at it from an angle through the woods, but they ran into the fence too. They got a few photos.’ They were clear images, but there wasn’t much to see. The fence itself was obvious – a web of mesh running through the trees, topped with haphazard curls of razor wire. One photo showed a smiling man in a hoody and sunglasses standing close to the fence for scale, making it obvious it was at least ten feet high.
Didn’t want to get too close
, he’d written.

‘They thought it might be electrified,’ I said.

‘Why would an empty hospital have that kind of security?’

‘Exactly.’

There was another photograph, this time of the gate they’d mentioned, shot from a short distance away. The road leading up to it was little more than a dirt track, but the gate looked far more elaborate. It had two iron struts at the sides, with a solid slab of metal between them. There was something that looked like a keypad on one side. A second photograph showed some kind of sensor in the undergrowth, with a grille above it for speaking into.

‘They all seem to have given up a while ago,’ I said, scanning the last posts in the forum. ‘The consensus seems to be that the place isn’t abandoned after all, although none of them have any idea what might be going on there.’

Maybe the Cane twins are still there?
someone had written.
Hanging out together with their dead mum?

The reply, the last comment in the thread, read:
I hope not. The thought of the poor bastards living their whole lives alone in the woods like that is too creepy to imagine
.

‘Well,’ Pete said, ‘we’re about to find out.’

We’d left the city behind us. To the right, fields sprawled
away, dotted with trees and piles of hay bales. To the left, the woods were still with us. As they flashed past, it was impossible to see more than a few metres into them before darkness claimed any real detail.