Every Last Devil: A Chilling British Crime Thriller, page 18
The PC from the IRV had walked over with them. He didn’t have a Taser, but he was a big lad with a baton.
“I can go check it out first, sir?” he asked.
“No, but you can tag along in case we need some backup. What’s your name?”
“PC Sales, sir. Alfie.”
“You want a hand over, sir?” Porter asked Kett. “I know gates are your greatest nemesis.”
“I don’t need a hand, Pete,” said Kett.
He was determined to prove it, too, scaling the gate with a little more gusto than his aching body was prepared for. He’d just managed to straddle the top when a cramp began in his thigh, and he propelled himself onto the path like an athlete before it could take hold.
“Bloody hell, sir,” said Porter, his eyebrows rising. “You’ve been in training.”
“Yep,” said Kett, refusing to let the pain show as he limped down the track. “Try to keep up.”
Porter vaulted the gate easily, and so did Sales. The woodland was even thicker than Kett had first thought, the trees strangled by the tangled undergrowth, snake-like creepers that choked their way towards the immense weight of the canopy. The magpies clucked and chuckled from where they hid in the shadows. Once again, Kett had the unshakable feeling they were laughing at him.
There were more noises up ahead, a chorus of neighs and the thunder of hooves on dry earth.
“You like horses, Pete?” Kett asked.
“They’re half-tonne wild things with devil’s eyes and teeth that could take your head off,” he said. “And they look a bit like cows. What do you think?”
The track widened up ahead, revealing a small car park with a knackered horse trailer on one side and an ancient green Rav 4 on the other. There was a line of smaller brick and flint outbuildings between the car park and the longer edge of the barn. To the right, past a stack of old machine parts, was nothing but woodland, a trail leading into the trees. To the left, the car park led through an open gate into a courtyard.
Kett paused, trying to hear any human sounds past the unseen horses. When he couldn’t, he walked quickly and quietly to the gate, peering around the edge. The courtyard was lined with stables, six of them in total. Two horses stared back over their doors, no emotion at all in their dark eyes. The track continued, leading towards a paddock and, just visible over the hedges, the roof of Robert Flack’s chapel.
Boxing in the right-hand side of the courtyard was the barn, its huge metal doors shut tight. A chain as big as the one on the main gate had been looped through the handles.
“Sales,” said Kett. “See if you can find a way into the barn.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sales, uncertain.
“Don’t enter, just find a way. Pete, with me.”
Kett set off across the courtyard, Porter treading on his shadow. Sales was running to the barn doors, his equipment rattling so loud he sounded like a fully laden mule. After a handful of seconds, he was out of sight behind the stables as Kett and Porter reached the paddock. It hadn’t been subdivided, seven horses grazing together in the acre or so of grass, their tails whisking at the flies. A path led down the back wall of the stables, vanishing behind a monstrous hedge.
Past the electrified fence at the far side of the paddock was Flack’s meadow, the chapel peeking over the top of the grass like it was hiding from them. There was a distinct path mown into it, one that led directly from here to there.
“Doesn’t exactly look like a separate property, sir,” said Porter.
“It does not.”
Kett walked towards the horses, some of them beginning to pay attention. They circled each other, nickering. One reared, causing the others to bolt deeper into the field.
“Easy,” called Kett, holding up a hand. “Easy.”
But there was something urgent in their skittish movements. They were restless.
He wondered if they were afraid.
“Let’s see where that goes,” said Kett, heading towards the hedge.
Then freezing when somebody appeared at the other end of the path.
It was a man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. The sun was in his face, his squint making him look older than he probably was—maybe Kett’s age. He was struggling with a stack of plastic buckets, making such a racket as he walked that he didn’t notice he wasn’t alone. The horses welcomed him with a serenade of noise.
“Quiet your racket,” he barked towards the field, a little Welsh in his accent. “It’s coming.”
The horses began to trot towards him, their fear overruled by hunger. The man reached the edge of the paddock and set his buckets down, arching his back. He was reaching for the hook that connected the electric wire to the gatepost when Kett spoke.
“Afternoon.”
It was as if the man had been electrified by his own fence. His feet literally left the ground, his hand clutching his heart as if to keep it in place.
“Jesus Arsing Christ,” he roared. “What the fuck?”
Kett reached into his pocket, pulling out his warrant card.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’re—”
The man took off, sprinting back the way he’d come, his sudden motion throwing the horses into a stampede of panic.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Kett, shouting over the thunder of hooves. “Go get him, Pete.”
Porter was already running, but the man was fast—already out of sight behind the hedge.
“Sales!” Kett yelled, his voice echoing off the back of the stables. “Incoming!”
He started to jog, every bone in his back feeling like it was close to shattering. He’d made it halfway along the stable block when he caught sight of something in his peripheral vision.
On the far side of the paddock, Robert Flack sat in his wheelchair at the end of the path that led to his house. He was shouting something, but Kett couldn’t make any sense of it over the hammer blows of his heart and the drum of the horses in the field. He stopped running, pointing a finger at Flack.
“Don’t move!”
Flack didn’t show any sign of going anywhere. His voice cut through the hot air, four syllables that Kett still couldn’t grasp.
From somewhere behind the stables came a shout of anger, one that might have been Porter.
“Fuck,” Kett said.
There was only one way to get to Flack, but he didn’t fancy crossing the paddock when the horses were in a frenzy. They hurled themselves from fence to fence, foaming at the mouth, their eyes white with panic.
And still Flack called, his voice rising in pitch.
“Sir?”
Sales ran through the gate from the stables, his baton out. Kett pointed to the hedge.
“That way, one male, my age. DI Porter’s gone after him.”
The PC ran off, almost tripping on the uneven ground.
Kett turned his attention back to Flack. The man was practically screaming now, his voice driving the horses into an even wilder state of terror. He looked possessed.
Kett ran to the post where the electrified fence was connected, slipping the cables free so that he could step through, then reconnecting them after he’d entered the field. The horses shied away from him, bolting to the far side of the paddock, which edged the dense woodland. There they finally stopped, sheltering in the shadow of the trees.
In the sudden quiet, Kett finally heard what Flack was screaming.
“You brought it here! You brought it here!”
Over and over, his pitch still rising like a kettle.
Even in the relentless heat of the sun, Kett’s scalp shrivelled, ice cold.
“You brought it here! You brought it here! You…”
Flack stopped dead, his head twisting slowly to where the horses did their best to hide. His eyes held the lunatic fear of a child who has woken in the night to the sound of something in their room.
“Robert, stay where you are,” said Kett, crossing the paddock as quickly as the hoof-churned ground would let him. “Don’t move.”
Flack wasn’t moving. He wasn’t doing anything. He was still staring at the horses.
At them, Kett realised, or at the woods beyond.
He wasn’t sure why he stopped walking. His body staggered to a halt without his permission, refusing to start up again. Flack was still staring, wild-eyed, at the woods, and Kett turned there too. He tried to peel the trees apart, to see what lay between those crooked branches, in that suffocating blanket of weed, but they refused to give up their secrets.
“Robert?” he said.
His heart was as wild as the horses, refusing to settle. It knew something he didn’t, some primal part of him beaming out a warning with every thump of his pulse.
“Robert,” he said again. “What’s going on?”
The man in the wheelchair turned his head, painfully slowly. His face was so drawn that it could have been a mask.
“I’m sorry,” he shouted. “I told you. You should have walked away. You should have—”
It wasn’t a sound, it was a feeling—a subsonic charge that detonated from the direction of the woods. The horses screamed, there was no other word for it, once again carving up the field in a tsunami of violence.
Heading right for Kett.
“Fuck!” he said, turning, slipping, hurling himself across the paddock towards the fence. It was a race he couldn’t win, the horses catching up with him in seconds, the ground shaking beneath the force of them.
Then fading as they wheeled around.
Kett staggered to a halt, looking back to see the animals running away from him now, circling the field. They charged towards Flack, his face a carnival mask of terror as, one by one, they jumped the fence onto the path beyond.
“No!” Kett shouted.
Flack vanished under the hooves of the first horse, the others following, churning up a cloud of dust as they galloped into the meadow. It was over in seconds, the animals subdued by the long grass, beaten into submission by the sudden quiet of the day.
Kett’s body came back online and he ran towards where Flack lay in a tangle of metal and flesh. He stopped before he reached him, though, because even from twenty yards away he could see there was no saving him.
“What the fuck?” he said, locking his hands in his hair.
He stared at the woods through the tears that were already gathering.
And he couldn’t shake the feeling that the woods were staring back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Porter wasn’t sure how he’d managed to lose him.
The man had bolted down the path beside the paddock, then vanished into the overgrown hedge like it had swallowed him alive. Porter threw himself in after him, the cool, sharp branches scratching at his face and his neck until it spat him out the other side.
“Fucking twatty hedges,” he said, spitting scraps of conifer. He was in a narrow garden, a small pebble-dashed bungalow dead ahead and the barn to his right—so tall that it had thrown almost everything into shade. “Oi! Where are you?”
It was no surprise, really, that the man didn’t answer.
Porter ran for the bungalow, making it three strides before he heard footsteps behind him. He whirled around to see PC Sales stagger out of the hedge. He’d lost his hat somewhere, but he held up his baton.
“You found him, sir?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Porter. “Then I gave him a pat on the head and let him go. Course I haven’t. Go for the barn. I’ll take the house.”
Porter jogged across the small garden, reaching the side of the bungalow. There were two windows, both of which had their curtains drawn. He followed the wall to the right, Sales moving the same way as he tried to find the entrance to the barn. They hopped over a neglected flowerbed together and Porter saw the bungalow’s front door ahead.
He tried the handle. Locked.
“Gonna lose my job for this,” he muttered. Although with everything that had happened today—the severed head, the heat, the bastard hedge—he wasn’t sure he cared.
He stepped back, then drove his foot into the door just beneath the handle. It resisted, but only just. He tried again and it wobbled open.
“Police!” he shouted, pushing into a dark corridor. “If you don’t let me know you’re in here, I’m going to do the same thing to you I just did to the door.”
Which wouldn’t make much sense, he realised, if nobody had been watching. He ducked into a small living room. The TV was on, a movie paused, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray. Across the hall was a dining room that was being used as an office, the computer off. Both bedrooms at the back were empty.
He was entering the kitchen when he heard a scream from outside.
“Shit,” he said, running back into the garden.
The barn was right ahead. It seemed like it had grown even bigger since he’d been in the bungalow. If he’d had any doubts at all that’s where the scream had come from, they were dashed when another shriek erupted from the building.
Porter ran around to the back of the barn, finding an open door. By the time he’d reached it, the shouts from inside were coming thick and fast—more than one voice.
He slid into the dark, finding himself in a small storage room. Bags of wood shavings were stacked in one corner, filling the air with the scent of pine. Shelves held an assortment of horse stuff, but there was human food there, too. A lot of it. Pallets of baked beans, canned fruit, and what had to be a hundred bottles of water.
He was halfway across the room when he noticed the shape that had been scored into the floor—another pentagram, gouged into the wooden boards, the trenches crimson.
More shouts poured through a door in the opposite wall, crashes, the unmistakeable soundtrack of a fight.
Porter pushed into the barn’s huge interior. Light streamed through slatted windows high in the walls, picking out the two men who rolled on the sawdust-covered floor. Sales was losing the fight, the other man on top of him and throwing punches into the side of his head.
“Oi!” Porter roared, barrelling towards them.
He grabbed the man by the back of his T-shirt, hauling him off Sales. But the guy was stronger than he looked. He thrust his body upwards like a Jack-in-the-box, the top of his head thumping Porter under the chin like a hammer. He staggered away, his head full of fire, the pain so bright it blinded him.
A punch connected with his gut and he fell back, the soft ground breaking his fall. He shook away the panic to see the man pick something up off the floor—Sales’ baton—lifting it over his head as he lumbered towards him. Sales was doing his best to get back to his feet, his face bloody. And behind him…
Porter hadn’t seen them when he’d entered the barn. He wasn’t sure if he was even seeing them now. It felt like a hallucination.
Cages, big ones, lined up against the far wall. Four in total.
Two were occupied.
A teenage boy sat in one cage, his face drawn. A younger girl occupied the other. It was her that was screaming, over and over and over.
The man reached Porter, the baton swinging earthwards.
No time to get up. Porter rolled, sawdust filling his mouth. The baton hit the ground, then rose again, ready for another strike.
The man never got the chance.
Kett slammed into him like a train, both of them hitting the floor in a duet of grunts. The DCI grabbed the baton, ripping it out of the man’s hand and hurling it across the barn. Then Sales was there, dropping onto the man’s arm and pinning it to the floor. The guy was wild, his legs thrashing, his body bucking so hard he almost managed to knock Kett off him.
Porter got to his feet, wheezing from the punch to his stomach. He planted a shoe on the man’s other hand while Sales tried to get the cuffs on his wrist. Blood dripped from the PC’s nose, from a cut above his eye. He could barely see what he was doing.
“You absolute wanker,” said Porter. “Stay still, or you’ll be unconscious by the time you get to the station.”
The man showed no sign of calming down. He was lost in a frenzy of violence, his body contorting. His face was doing something weird, his jaw bulging, his teeth grinding. It was only when he opened his mouth to take in a breath and a fountain of blood exploded upwards that Porter realised what he was doing.
“His tongue,” he said. “He’s biting off his fucking tongue.”
“Get something!” Kett roared, trying to grab the man’s jaw.
He chewed, choking on his own blood, practically convulsing.
Porter scanned the floor, looking for something they could jam between the man’s teeth. There was only the baton, and he picked it up, collapsing onto his knees next to the man’s head.
“Do it,” said Kett, the DCI’s face slick with blood as the man continued to choke.
Porter tried to slide the baton into the machine of the man’s grinding teeth, but he was whipping his head from side to side. The horror of it was making his skin feel like it was boiling, the girl’s screams driving him close to madness.
“Fuck this,” he said, and he swung the baton into the man’s temple, hard.
It was like a switch had been flicked. The man stopped thrashing, stopped kicking, his desperate breaths rattling wetly. Between them, they rolled the guy onto his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood. Kett opened the man’s mouth, the mess of his tongue drooping. Porter could see the teeth marks, but he hadn’t managed to bite it off.
Sales held on for another couple of seconds then scampered towards the main doors, spewing vomit over the sawdust. He doubled over, groaning.
“Christ,” said Kett, meeting Porter’s eye, mirroring his expression.
The girl’s screams were louder now, joined by an angry shout from the boy in the cage beside her.
“You okay?” Kett asked Porter.
“No, sir, I’m not,” he replied.
“You okay?” Kett shouted after Sales.
The young PC nodded, wiping the drool from his lips.
“Get the cuffs on him,” said Kett. “Then find something we can use to secure his mouth so he doesn’t try that again.”
“I’ll get an ambulance out here,” said Porter, going for his phone.
