The Silent Ones (31 page)

She jumped forward and the knife slashed down near his face. He feinted and grabbed at the shelf to use as leverage and, in a panic, saw that the shelf was coming away from the wall, items scattering to the floor. Panic became shock as the entire unit swung outwards from the wall, revealing behind it a door. The back wall of the lock-up, Darren realised, was false; the cake kitchen took up only a small part of the space. A trapdoor flew open in Darren’s mind; something horrible lurked behind it.

Berenice faltered and at that moment Darren dropped the bag and lunged at her with the paint-stripper gun. A jet of blue flame hit her face. She howled and recoiled, tripping over the skateboard. Darren was on top of her in a moment, the gun burning her eyes, her knife flailing madly. She caught him in the side, a pain so agonising he couldn’t breathe. He pressed the gun in closer and she had to drop the knife and scrabble to push the burning jet away from her blistering skin. Her shrieks reverberated round the damp arch.

‘Where is my sister?’ he yelled, a smell of burning flesh in his nostrils. She was bucking hard underneath him, her face straining to escape the fierce heat. He pinned her arms with his knees and dropped the gun, grabbing her neck and slamming her head down on the concrete. She stopped moving immediately.

He pulled the keys out of her pocket, stood up and staggered against the island, pain and faintness overwhelming him.

He stood in front of the concealed door. There was no handle and it opened inwards. He tried two of the keys before he found the one that fitted the lock. Bleeding heavily and feeling fainter by the second, he opened the door.

A
thick black curtain hung across the doorway. Darren pulled it hesitantly aside.

Behind the curtain a light was on, and he saw a large living room, the walls made of brick and covered with paintings. It was like a loft, only without any windows. It was comfortably furnished, with sofas, a table and chairs, a TV on a stand and a computer. There were rugs on the floor and a boxing ring set up in the middle of the room. Next to the boxing ring was a running machine and a pull-up bar.

Movement caught his eye from behind one of the sofas. A woman’s head was peering over it, staring at him. Darren felt the faintness rush back at him and he thought he was going to collapse. There were bunk beds in the far corner and another woman was under one of the beds, her dark eyes blinking at him.

‘Darren?’

That voice. He turned to his right and his heart exploded. Carly was standing there, in the kitchen of the concealed room. She was perfectly still, her eyes discs of shock in her face.

‘Darren?’ She said it again, as if not believing he could be real.

He couldn’t breathe or move. He had so much to say that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough. A woozy panic rushed through him; he felt that, now he had finally found her, he would die before he fully absorbed the fact. Trying to shake it off, he took a step towards her, but before he could say anything she screamed a warning. He turned. A hard smack hit him across the head. As he fell to the floor he saw Berenice standing over him, one of her eyes a running mess of scorched and disfigured tissue.

The room erupted into action. Carly sprang towards Berenice and jumped on her, pulling her to the ground and punching her. Darren couldn’t move; his limbs were jelly. Blood from his head poured into his eye. Now Berenice was down and not moving and Carly was kneeling over him.

He felt someone pulling his ankle. ‘He’s my brother, leave him alone!’ Carly cried.

A woman with long blonde hair was trying to drag him across the floor. ‘It’s not safe and you know it, Carly.’

Two other women were standing by the blonde-haired one, and he realised one of them looked like Rajinder, although her hair was in a different style. The other woman had brown hair.

The brown-haired woman was whimpering. ‘Is she dead?’ She was looking down at Berenice.

‘Run!’ Darren shouted.

‘Darren, get up, now.’ Carly had her hands under his armpits, pulling him upright. The woman with blonde hair was still hanging on to his ankle.

He was woozy and wanted desperately to sleep, but managed to say, ‘Run, Carly, run!’

‘Stay here, Carly. I mean it!’ Darren realised that the woman with blonde hair must be Isla. She looked so different from how he remembered her as a child, but her voice, so like Orin’s, was familiar.

‘It’s over, it’s finally over,’ Darren tried to shout, but the sound died in his throat. Everyone was moving so slowly. He didn’t understand it; they were prisoners in this hellhole, suspended for a decade in a horror he couldn’t begin to contemplate, and no one was moving.

He heard a noise behind him and saw Rajinder hammering at something on the table. A piece of computer disk flew up in the air.

‘He is innocent!’ Carly was pulling on his arms. He was being stretched between the two women.

‘We are so close!’ Isla shouted.

‘It’s over,’ Carly said.

‘Run, Carly, run!’ Darren finally managed to shout.

Carly was galvanised into action. She pushed Isla away from him, grabbed him under the armpits again and got him to his feet. She was surprisingly strong. Leaning on each other, they came out of that room and they led each other back into the world.

The brown-haired woman came close behind them, gulping in air and crying. Isla had followed too, he realised. She was standing inches from him, staring intently.

‘It’s over, Isla, you’re safe,’ he struggled to say.

Isla said something he couldn’t hear and backed away to a wall. ‘No we’re not.’

‘Your dad—’ A wave of pain erupted in him.

She shook her head. She said ‘no’ again, louder, then turned and ran away, disappearing round the corner.

‘Wait!’ Darren tried to follow her but he had no energy left and he stumbled and fell. Something was badly wrong inside him – every sinew in his body was straining but he was floating away, unable to stay grounded.

Carly was kneeling by him on the floor, cradling his head in her lap, pawing him to stop him falling into unconsciousness, saying his name over and over, trying it out, seeing how it fit.

He felt much weaker and only had the strength to whisper. ‘I looked so long, so long I looked for you.’

Carly gazed up at the sky and she howled from the depths of her soul, a pain profound and raw and triumphant. Darren felt an acute agony in his heart, such an intense moment of joy he thought it might overwhelm his body and kill him. Tomorrow she would see the sun, and all the tomorrows after that. She had emerged, kicking and screaming back into the world, a rebirth, a miracle. As he floated away he knew one thing: love was strong, stronger than life.

W
hen the police arrived at Melanie’s door for the second time that night, they told her that Darren was in a critical condition in hospital with multiple stab wounds and was under police guard. The young officer looked grey with fright and twitching to get going. She sat far from Andy in the car, staring dully out of the window at the London night. She had suffered the worst that life could throw at a mother, people said, it would never be as bad as that again, they said. But they were wrong, as she had always known they were.

Melanie had read on the internet that cancer drugs could make you hallucinate and that emotional stress could enhance the hallucinogenic effect. Which was why while she stood looking at one half-dead child wrapped in bandages and on a drip in a hospital bed with a face battered black and blue, a vision who looked like her own younger self was coming across the room towards her, floating and shimmering in a chaos of police and people in white coats. The vision looked like Carly, but the room was so noisy and crowded and Andy was gasping in her ear and she heard a sound that only her most fantastical dreams had allowed her to dare imagine.

This vision shouted ‘Mum!’

A moment later Carly was in her arms; she could feel the warmth of her, smell the shampoo in her hair, hear her daughter crying into her neck.

Melanie sank down on to the bed, her legs unable to support her. She grabbed Carly’s face between her palms, drinking in how her teenage features had changed into an adult’s: her cheekbones were more prominent, her eyebrows thinner, her face sadder and more set. But she was vital and alive and right here.

As Melanie clung to her daughter she was transported to a time years ago when she had sailed out into the English Channel to watch a solar eclipse. As the boat bobbed in the water, the seagulls had suddenly fallen silent and the wind had dropped. She had felt a spike of fear as a huge threatening shadow had raced over her across the miles of open water. She had been stunned at the speed that the earth was travelling, had been in awe at the scale of the universe. It felt to her now as if that monstrous darkness, the pain and loss of the past ten years, was receding at lightning speed away from her and her child. She had been forgiven. She thanked every god and spirit she could think of for her daughter’s deliverance.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Carly sobbed.

‘I knew you would come back, I
knew
.’

The harsh alarm on Darren’s monitor exploded into life as his heart gave out.

O
livia was woken by the cell door opening. A group of guards filed in. Suspicion swam round in her mind as she sat up. No one ever came this early or in these numbers. The routine was out.

She’d heard the alarm yesterday – it could be heard in every cell in the accommodation block – but when she had pumped the guard for information through the hatch in the door, she got nothing more than a terse denial of everything. She could feel the tension though, the quickening steps, the long periods of silence as people did things elsewhere. She had never heard that alarm before; it must be used only for escapes or large-scale events. She wondered what had happened. It had been turned off less than ten minutes later, but the biting tension remained.

They must have discovered who Darren was. This wasn’t a surprise; it was always going to happen eventually. But somehow the mood this morning didn’t fit that theory: one of the guards was grinning. She stood up, anticipation crackling in the soles of her feet, but she was ordered to sit back down. Helen appeared in the doorway.

Berenice, she thought in despair. Her first thoughts were always that something might have happened, that a revelation had been made that would break their tenuous connection – the slim strands of snatched words in the lunch queue, the glorious moment twenty-nine days ago when she had been close enough to touch her arm. It was four and a half months since she had been near enough to smell her.

Helen looked dishevelled, like she hadn’t slept. Her make-up was heavier than normal. Olivia saw restrainers in the arms of one of the guards. She stood sharply, and this time they didn’t bother telling her to sit back down.

‘The women have been found,’ Helen said. She turned to leave the cell. She didn’t even bother to look at Olivia. ‘Darren discovered them.’

‘All of them?’ Olivia’s voice was coming from far away, from someone who was not her at all.

‘Berenice McArthur is dead. Carly Evans killed her.’ Helen put a hand on the door.

‘Wait!’ But Helen didn’t wait. She disappeared round the door. ‘Wait! Did they say anything? What did they say about me?’

She tried to run after Helen, the questions piling up into a great mountain of anguish and failure, but the guards didn’t let her. Helen didn’t come back. It was over. She screamed as loudly as she could, and lashed out with her nails at the nearest guard. She was wailing, unable to contain the grief and the endless questions. The guards were more than ready. They circled her in a practised manoeuvre, restraining arms and legs, avoiding her gnashing teeth. She kicked and thrashed, the few words Helen had said more brutal and final than any she could have imagined.

Darren and Carly had destroyed everything that made Olivia’s life worth living. She had been in control, and somehow, the clueless cleaner had undone ten years of work. So much work!

Her hands were clamped together now. She saw one of the nurses preparing an injection and she howled expletives down on them all.

There was something even worse than what Helen had told her. The men in her cell were grinning, as if she didn’t matter any more. As if the power she had held was drained entirely away; she was already a nobody. Theirs were the grins of the victors.

D
arren was pulled back to consciousness with a hard slap on his left arm. He was disorientated, the light too bright for his eyes, his limbs like lead. An African nurse was shaking her head, remonstrating with Orin, who stood next to her. ‘He needs to rest to get better! You get five minutes, then you’re out.’ She pressed the button on the bed and Darren began to rise to a semi-seated position. She turned and left the room and Darren saw that Carly was also there, leaning on a windowsill.

Darren was too weak to move. His hand was connected to a drip by the bed; he had difficulty keeping his head upright. That was OK though: he didn’t want to do anything except gaze at his sister. She smiled at him uncertainly and he thought he could sit here for the rest of his life and stare at her like an idiot. She looked the same, yet so different. Her face was thinner than he remembered, her hair longer and darker. She was striking now that her face’s childish plumpness was gone, but there was sadness in her eyes, an air of being old before her time. He was staring at a beautiful stranger.

‘Partially collapsed lung, stab wounds to the vastus medialis and the right deltoid and a depressed fracture of the skull.’ Orin had picked up Darren’s notes and charts from the hook at the bottom of the bed and read from them, his voice a monotone. ‘Your heart stopped twice, you came out of intensive care this morning. You’ve been out of action for five days, but you’re back now.’ He hung the notes back on the bed and stood, arms crossed, feet splayed, looking down at Darren. ‘Where’s my daughter?’