Every Last Devil: A Chilling British Crime Thriller, page 23
“Nobody’s been checking on her?” said Kett.
Spalding shrugged.
“She’s getting close to the age where nobody cares. Waiting for social to get back to me. Last foster parents are Elaine and Graham Hamilton, can’t reach them by phone.”
“I can go,” said Kett. “What about the boy?”
“No clue, sir,” said Spalding. “There’s no MP report for somebody of that name. Got the plods scouring the files for a match, though.”
“Tell me what happened at McDonald’s,” said Clare, perching on the edge of a table. “Fire service says three cars were burnt to their shells, and they still might lose the building.”
Kett scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to remember.
“We were sitting down to eat, sir. I saw the man through the window. He was wearing a mask, he was pointing at us, at the kids, I think. It’s the same guy.”
He pointed to the wall, to a pixelated photo of the masked figure they’d seen through the cottage window on Megan’s camera.
“Or the same mask, anyway. I got the kids out, went for the car, but…”
“But the car was on fire,” said Clare when Kett didn’t finish. “Because only you could make an IRV spontaneously combust, Kett.”
“Wasn’t me, sir. But… but it did seem like it was spontaneous. The man in the mask was nowhere near them, but as soon as he pointed, they just…”
He lifted his hands, then slapped them down again.
“They say how the fire started, sir?”
“Not yet,” said Clare. “I’ll get the report in the next hour. I’m not expecting it to say witchcraft.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“By some miracle, no,” said Clare. “You said you think there’s more than one person? That they’re wearing the same costume?”
“It’s the only way I can explain it, sir,” said Kett. “The guy was behind us in the car park as we drove away. Then he was in front of us, by the road. He couldn’t have moved that quickly. It had to have been somebody else wearing the same clothes, the same mask.”
“We already know this isn’t one person,” said Clare. “We found two men keeping the kids in cages, and we think they’re working with Bianca Caddel, who—as far as I know—still has Aggie Clegg. Your devil makes four, but we could be looking at five, six, a hundred more. We don’t know.”
“But that’s what doesn’t make sense, sir,” said Kett. “The kids weren’t afraid of the men who were holding them prisoner. They were afraid of the guy in the mask.”
“They’re afraid of demons,” said Savage as she walked through the door. “Freya just told me. The cages, the little bits of paper with the strange markings, those things were all designed to hide the children from whatever was looking for them.”
“The man in the mask?” said Kett.
“Bullshit,” said Clare. “These guys are all in on it together. Whoever the twat at McDonald’s was, he was there to get his prisoners back.”
“That’s just what the kids believe, sir,” said Savage. “All of them, according to Freya. Not just her and Dmitri.”
“All of them?” said Kett.
“There were others, sir. Freya can’t remember how many, but it’s a lot. At least four, all kept in the cages before being moved out. None of them were told why they were there, only that it wouldn’t be forever.”
“That’s what she said?” Kett asked. “That they wouldn’t be prisoners forever?”
Savage nodded.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Kett, rubbing his face again. He started to speak, but was stopped by a yawn that almost unhinged his jaw.
“Sorry, Robert, are we keeping you up?” said Clare, glaring.
The yawn was still going. Clare checked his watch.
“Any time today, Detective.”
“Sorry,” said Kett when he’d got control of his face again. “I…”
He’d completely forgotten what he’d been about to say.
It didn’t matter, because a thunder of voices rose up in the corridor outside, and a few seconds later Duke walked in, accompanied by Josh, the cameraman, and Kelly, the presenter.
“I’m sorry,” Duke was saying. “I can’t control it. It’s the job, it can’t always be exciting.”
“Yes, but some excitement might be nice,” said Kelly.
“Nice of you to join us, Duke,” muttered Clare. “Any news from the cottage? Did you walk right past our killer again? Or maybe this time you stopped for a chat? Perhaps you stayed long enough to trade eyebrows?”
Duke rubbed his forehead sadly. Josh lifted his camera, but a glare from Clare made him lower it almost immediately.
“There was nothing in the cottage,” said Kelly, before Duke could reply. “We filmed him wandering from room to room for twenty minutes, like some kind of homeless, hungry kitten, and that was it.”
Duke slumped onto a chair in the corner, looking, for all his size, like a sad little boy.
“Got lots of humming, though,” said Josh.
“Oh please, don’t mention the humming,” said Kelly. “He never stops. I tell him to be quiet for the shot, and three seconds later he’s humming again.”
“I don’t hum!” said Duke. “And it’s not my fault. I bet these guys didn’t get to do anything exciting either.”
Duke stared hopefully at Kett, then at Savage.
“Right?”
“I mean…” started Kett. “It depends on your definition of exciting.”
“It wasn’t really that exciting,” said Savage. “It wasn’t an attack, really.”
“And the IRVs didn’t explode too much.”
“It wasn’t like we were in a huge car chase.”
“And the knife wasn’t too big…”
Duke stared at them.
“The point of all this,” said Clare, turning to Kelly, “is that you aren’t authorised to be in here. So toss off and leave us to it.”
“With pleasure,” said Kelly, heading for the door. “If you’re lucky, we’ll be back in the morning.”
“If we’re lucky, you’ll climb into an elephant’s tosshole and suffocate in smegma,” said Clare, although Kett didn’t think anyone heard him over the sound of the door closing. “Nothing to report then, Duke?”
“No, sir,” he said, utterly miserable. “I still don’t understand how I missed him. It’s like he… It’s like he had powers. Like he was a real demon or something.”
“He’s not a demon,” said Kett. “Just like the woman we saw this morning isn’t a real witch.”
“That’s what I was about to say, sir,” said Savage. “I asked the kids if they’d seen the woman who took Aggie, I showed them the photo of her. They told me she was a witch, but that she wasn’t the thing that scared them the most. There’s something worse out there.”
“Worse?” said Clare.
Savage seemed to steel herself.
“Yes, sir. They said the thing that scares them the most, the thing that’s chasing them, is the devil.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Sir, you need to see this.”
DI Porter looked up from the floor of the cage where Freya Martin had been kept, spotting a PC standing in the open door of the barn. He was beckoning furiously.
“You found something?” Porter called back.
“I’m not sure, sir. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Porter echoed quietly. He backed out of the cage and stood up. “Maybe’s no good to us, mate.”
They’d found fuck all so far in their search of the stables, and even less inside Robert Flack’s house. Whatever Flack and Blethyn had been doing here, they’d made sure there was no paper trail. Other than the cages, and their occupants, there was nothing incriminating on site at all.
“What?” Porter barked as he reached the constable, sidestepping the pentagram on the barn floor.
“Over here, sir,” the man said. “There’s something weird with the stables.”
“Weird how?” said Porter.
The man didn’t reply, jogging across the courtyard and stopping at the last of the six stables, where another handful of coppers were gathered like restless geese. He gestured at the door with such enthusiasm that Porter was surprised he didn’t say, “Ta-daa!”
“What am I looking at?” he said once he’d caught up.
“Have a peek, sir.”
Porter was in no mood for mysteries. The sun had sunk beneath the trees, but the evening heat was as thick and as hot as soup. If there wasn’t a storm later, he’d eat his hat.
“Just in there,” the PC hinted, nodding at the stable.
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Porter.
He opened the door and squinted into the dark. The stable was maybe twelve feet square, the walls crumbling brick, the cement floor covered in a dusting of straw but otherwise clean. A mahogany wardrobe stood in one corner like it had got lost on the way to a bedroom somewhere.
The PC walked around the outside of the stable block to the back wall, and Porter reluctantly followed.
“Can you just tell me what I’m supposed to be looking at?” he said, dry mud crunching beneath his boots.
“This,” said the PC, gesturing again.
Porter sighed as he took in the back wall of the building. Like the rest of the stable block, it was brick and flint and looked close to collapsing. There were no doors, no markings, no anything.
“It’s a wall,” he said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Yeah, it’s a wall to what, sir?”
Porter sucked air through his teeth, eyeballing the man.
“Any chance I could borrow your baton, mate?”
“My baton, sir?” said the PC. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to give you an enema with it, unless you tell me what you’re on about.”
“The wall, sir,” said the PC, backing away. “It’s too far out. Look.”
Porter looked again, and this time he saw it. This section of the stable block jutted out from the rest by about five feet, as if somebody had added a small extension. There were no windows and no doors.
He ran back around to the stable, then checked the one next door. Both were the same size, the rear wall ended at the same spot.
“Shit,” he said, walking back into the stable. “There’s a room there. You could have just bloody said that.”
“Sorry, sir,” said the PC.
Porter opened the wardrobe to see that it was empty. It was too close to the wall to make out if there was anything behind it.
“Stand back,” he told the PC, grabbing the top of the wardrobe and pulling hard.
It tipped, dirt raining from the top.
“You need a hand, sir?”
“Nope,” said Porter, every muscle straining.
The wardrobe was too heavy, crunching back against the wall and almost taking his fingers off.
“Shit,” he said. “Little help?”
“I just…”
The PC stopped arguing, squeezing between the wardrobe and the wall.
“On three,” said Porter. “One, two, three.”
They pulled the top of the wardrobe together and it toppled like a redwood. It hit the floor with an explosion of dust that was so thick it took Porter a moment to see what sat behind it.
A door.
“Holy shit,” said Porter. “Good find.”
He tried the brass handle, giving it a good tug to no avail. The door was an old one, and it was solid. The keyhole was enormous, but when Porter put his eye to it, he saw only darkness.
“Get some tools,” he said. “Get it open.”
“Yes, sir,” said the PC, practically flying out of the stable.
Porter put an ear to the door but couldn’t hear a thing. He rapped his fist on it.
“Police, is anyone in there?”
If there was, they didn’t want to talk to him.
He stood back as the PC reappeared, a crowbar in his hand. Two more followed, armed with whatever they’d managed to find inside the yard’s outbuildings. One held a mallet and a chisel, the other was struggling with what looked like an old-fashioned hoe. They set to work like the Three Stooges, the guy with the hoe almost taking off the head of the one with the mallet, while the PC with the crowbar wedged it into the wrong side of the door.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Porter as he watched.
But they found their rhythm before he could say anything, and after thirty seconds or so the door splintered out of its frame. The hinges had to have been in worse shape than the door because they gave up completely, the entire thing collapsing on top of the upturned wardrobe. Another storm of dust filled the stables, this one billowing in a wake of foul air from the room beyond the wall.
“Police with Taser!” yelled the PC, dropping his crowbar in order to pull his Taser from its holster. “Make yourself known.”
He moved through the door into the darkness beyond, followed by the other two constables—one still armed with his hoe. Porter pulled out his torch as he walked after them.
The room was microscopic, barely enough space for the four of them even standing shoulder to shoulder. In the weak glow of his torch it was painfully obvious it was empty—other than the carpet of ancient manure.
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Porter, coughing a decade’s worth of powdered horse shit from his lungs. “Good job, lads, you found the toilet.”
“There’s something here, sir,” said one of the men. Porter didn’t know what he was talking about until the PC dropped his boot onto the ground.
It rang like an old bell.
“Move,” said Porter, pushing the other men out of the way so that he could angle his torch downwards.
A sheet of corrugated iron covered the floor, maybe four-foot square.
“Get it up,” he said.
Porter grabbed one end while two constables took the other. Between them, they hefted it up, manure sliding off the sheet as they propped it against the wall.
A circular hole. A wooden ladder, dropping into darkness.
Porter aimed the torch into the opening, but the beam wasn’t brave enough to reach the bottom. A draft was still pushing upwards, stale air laced with the smell of death. Unlike the bunker, this shaft wasn’t built from bricks. Algae-slicked stones made up the walls. They looked like they’d been there since the dawn of time.
It was a well, he realised.
“Police,” he yelled, making one of the PCs grunt in shock. “Anyone down there?”
Only his echo replied.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said again.
“You want, uh, us to go first, sir?” said the PC, his voice dripping with reluctance.
Porter pulled off his jacket and handed it to one of them.
“No,” he said. “I’ll go. But you’d better be right behind me.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, grabbing the ladder and stepping onto a rung. It wobbled, his sphincter clenching so tight it could have cracked a nut. He clamped the torch between his teeth as he made his way down, trying not to gag at the stench that rose to meet him.
“You okay, sir?”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t want to know how deep he’d gone. He kept moving, the shaft swallowing him up just like the one at the bunker had done until, finally, a shape peeled itself from the dark below.
It was a face, the mouth open in a silent scream, its eyes pitch-black blisters of pure malice.
“Fuck,” he said, and the torch fell out of his mouth. It hit the ladder with another clang, spinning for a second or two until it landed on the body at the bottom of the well.
It was definitely a body. It lay on its back, the head twisted up, the arms caught beneath it, the legs propped against the wall as if it had tried to climb its way to freedom. It was wearing clothes that had rotted with age, its skin crawling with insects—so many of them that they teemed over the head of the torch, making the walls of the shaft look like they were crawling. Rot had set in, the air thick with it. Only the face seemed unaffected.
“Sir?” said the PC.
Porter felt the ladder shake as the copper made his way down, and he suddenly pictured the man falling, knocking him off and pinning him against the liquifying remains.
“Hang on,” he called up. “Stay there, don’t come down.”
The ladder stopped shaking. Porter clung to it, squinting into the bottom of the well. There was no sign of a tunnel leading out of it like there had been in the bunker. There was just the corpse.
“Can somebody call in a forensic team?” he said as he dropped onto the next rung. “Tell them we’ve got a body.”
He kept going before his joints could lock up, reaching the end of the ladder. The smell was so bad here he could barely breathe, could barely see past the tears in his eyes. He didn’t want to step off the rung because he couldn’t see where the corpse’s clothes ended and its limbs began. But he touched the toes of his shoe to the ground until it felt solid enough not to be flesh.
The corpse watched him as he ducked onto his haunches.
“Nope,” he said, picking up his torch and shaking away a forest of ants and millipedes. They crawled onto his hand, up his sleeves. More were swarming into his trousers and down his shoes. “Nope, nope, not happening.”
“Sir?” came a voice from too far overhead.
“I fucking hate this job,” he replied, his gut heaving.
He couldn’t make sense of what the corpse was wearing. There was what looked like a black dress, but there was something else covering the legs. Maybe jeans. He pinched the hem of the dress and peeled it back, releasing a fresh wave of rot that made his entire body contract.
“Nope.”
They were definitely jeans. He patted the pockets, his fingers sinking into the mush beneath.
“Oh, I fucking hate you,” he said, gagging again.
He tried the other side, and this time he felt something harder beneath the damp fabric of the jeans. He worked his hand into the pocket, recoiling when a spider the size of a golf ball bristled up his wrist.
“No!” he screamed, shaking it away. “You can fuck right off!”
