Every Last Devil: A Chilling British Crime Thriller, page 31
“Help me,” said Kett, grabbing the woman’s jaw with one hand.
The PC saw what was happening, his fingers in her mouth, both of them wrenching the jaw until it was wide enough for Kett to ram the warrant card in. He pressed hard, feeling the woman’s jaw tense, feeling her body rock from side to side in an effort to dislodge him.
“Calm down,” he said, all his weight on her head as he tried to stop her from spitting out the warrant card. “Stop fighting.”
The PC had managed to cuff her, but she was still as strong as a bear.
“You’re going to have to Taser her,” said Kett. “We have to knock her out.”
The woman bucked, and he almost fell off her.
“Now, Constable!”
“I’ll do it,” said Duke.
The PC loomed from the dark, a couple of torches picking him out like he was on stage. He aimed the Taser at the woman, his finger tense on the trigger.
“Wait until I’m—” Kett started.
Duke fired, the barbs hitting the woman in her chest. Kett dived away, the charge tingling up his arms from where he’d been holding her. She tensed, her back arched, the warrant card clenched in her jaw.
Then she slumped back to the ground, groaning.
“I said wait till I’m bloody off her, Aaron,” Kett said.
He scrabbled to the woman’s side, pulling the warrant card out of her mouth so that she could breathe. She wasn’t out, but she was done—her body twitching and spasming from the shock.
“Find me something to put in her mouth,” he said. “A tube, a cord, wooden spoon, anything to stop her getting to her tongue.”
The PC who’d arrived first ran off. Kett realised that the TV crew was there, filming from the shadows, but he didn’t have the energy to start shouting at them.
“Is Kate okay?” he said instead, looking up at Duke. “I heard her screaming.”
“She’s fine,” Duke replied. “Wasn’t her.”
“Who was it?”
Duke shrugged.
“Some woman.”
It seemed to take every ounce of strength he had left to get back on his feet. He braced a hand on the nearest shelf until the vertigo passed, then he pushed past Duke and the crew.
“Where is she?”
“Far side, sir,” said Duke, gesturing with his Taser.
Kett followed the pale haze of the torches, making it halfway across the enormous space before the overhead lights started to come back on. The sudden light blinded him as much as the dark had, and he had to screw his eyes shut, feeling his way along the shelf until the pain ebbed away enough for him to look.
Ahead of him, at the end of another aisle of high shelves, was Savage. She was kneeling next to a metal cage, identical to the ones they’d found at the stable yard.
Inside the cage, her legs curled up, her head buried in her knees, was a young woman.
She was wearing a filthy grey tracksuit, the hood up. Her hair spilled out of it, hiding her face. Judging by the way her shoulders jerked up and down, she was sobbing.
A handful of coppers explored the rest of the warehouse, their shouts filling the enormous space.
“Check everywhere,” Kett told them. “Every piece of furniture, every costume. There might be more of them.”
He jogged the last few feet to where Savage was.
“You okay?”
She nodded, although her face said otherwise.
“You, sir?”
“I’m alive,” he told her. “Bloody miracle, though. Got jumped by a witch.”
“A witch?”
“With a machete. What happened to you?”
“Lights went out,” said Savage, nodding to the other woman. “I heard her scream.”
“Who is she?” said Kett.
But he already knew.
“Aggie?” he asked.
The woman lifted her head, that cascade of hair spilling away from her face. Agnes Clegg looked up at him with tear-swollen eyes, still sobbing. Her face was a ruin of cuts and bruises, one side swollen up so much it looked like she, too, was wearing a mask.
But it was her. There was no doubt about it.
“Holy shit,” said Kett. “You found her.”
“We found her.”
Kett crouched down beside the cage. It was bolted, and secured with a heavy-duty padlock.
“You okay, Aggie?”
It was a stupid question. Her nostrils were clogged with old blood. It had crusted on her lips and her chin, like a beard. The capillaries in one eye had burst, making it crimson.
Everything about her made it clear she wasn’t okay.
But she was alive.
“You’re safe,” he told her. “Kate, call an ambulance.”
“Already have, sir,” she said. “It’s on its way.”
“We need to find the key.”
He stood up, bracing a hand on the cage to stop himself from falling. Just like the others, this one had a scrap of paper secured to the bars with ribbon, a pattern of crosses and lines drawn on it.
“Who attacked you, sir?” asked Savage, her knees cracking as she stood up.
“Bianca Caddel,” he said. “But somebody must have switched off the lights for her.”
“Maybe not, sir,” said Duke as he crossed the aisle. “Lights are on a timer. That Aggie Clegg?”
“Yeah,” said Savage.
“Thank God for that,” said Duke with a grin.
They all looked down at Aggie, then over to where the uniformed police crowded around Bianca Caddel in her witch costume.
“It’s over, then,” Duke went on. “It’s finished.”
Kett heaved in a breath.
“No,” he said after a moment. “It’s not.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Kett stepped out of the side door into the oven of the day. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves, but the heat was still unbearable, made worse by the fact he’d spent the last half an hour scouring every last inch of the stifling warehouse.
The place was a hoarder’s dream, a collection of anything and everything in towering piles. If the first floor had been bad, downstairs was even worse. Dozens of vehicles occupied one-half of the ground floor—including Bianca Caddel’s VW Passat—the rest dominated by actual buildings: sheds and portaloos and children’s playhouses, all fully erected.
A small section had been dedicated to electrical equipment, generators and projectors and giant speakers, plus a handful of lighting rigs in the corner next to the kitchen.
The same ornate pentagram had been carved into the floor in front of every door, and into the wall beside every window—each design etched with symbols and stained with old blood.
There was nobody else in the building, but it didn’t matter. They had their missing girl, and the woman who had taken her.
An ambulance sat like an island in the ocean of IRVs that filled the car park and the street beyond. They’d called it for Agnes, but it was Bianca Caddel who lay there. It had taken six coppers to get her down the stairs, the woman fighting them with every inch of her being, screaming into the rubber tube that Kett had tied around her head to stop her from biting off her own tongue. Even after the paramedics had rushed over and given her a shot, she’d resisted with monstrous strength before finally falling still.
It had taken some effort to get Aggie out as well. Her legs had been too weak to hold her, so Uniforms had carried her down the stairs and out of the door—everyone nervously skirting the pentagrams.
She now rested in the back of an IRV, a foil blanket on her lap and an untouched bottle of water in her hands. Savage sat next to her, chatting quietly. She’d checked the girl to make sure she wasn’t injured, but other than the nasty wound to her face, and a few bruises on her wrists where she’d been tied, she was unharmed.
The way she flinched when Kett appeared, though, and the look of terror that sat on her face until she recognised him as a policeman, made it clear that her mind was broken.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I didn’t mean to scare you. My name is Robbie. It’s Aggie, right?”
The young woman nodded, shuffling a few inches away from him and sliding into Savage. She jumped again, every part of her wound tight with anxiety.
“You’re okay, Aggie,” said Savage. “Remember what we talked about. Deep breaths. You’re safe.”
“I can come back?” said Kett, dropping uncomfortably onto his haunches outside the door. “It would just be good to have a quick chat, if you’re up for it?”
She didn’t look up for it at all, but she nodded.
“It’s her birthday,” said Savage. “Right, Aggie? Eighteen?”
“Happy Birthday,” said Kett. “Although I imagine you’ve had better. Your grandmother’s on the way to the hospital, she’s going to meet you there so they can check you over. Did Kate tell you?”
Aggie nodded, her eyes locked on the seat in front.
“Can you go over what happened?” Kett asked. His quads were burning from the effort of squatting, but he didn’t want to risk startling her again. “As much as you can remember.”
She’d clamped up, her clenched jaw bulging.
“Start with what you were just telling me,” said Savage. “Start with the masks.”
Aggie looked at Savage, then turned to Kett.
“They were masks?” she said, and he wasn’t sure if it was a question or not until she fell silent.
“Yeah,” he said. “The witch? It was a mask.”
The girl nodded, her eyes glazing over like she was being pulled into a memory.
“It looked so real,” she said. “I thought she was real. She was so strong.”
“She attacked you in the ruins, right?” said Kett. “We saw it on the camera.”
Aggie looked confused for a moment, as if she couldn’t remember what camera he was talking about.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The camera. Is it… did we break it?”
“It’s fine,” said Kett.
“That’s good,” said Aggie—quietly, as if she was in some kind of dream. “I was worried, it’s not mine.”
“Let’s start there, then,” said Kett. “The equipment you were using. You got it from the same man who owns this place, didn’t you? Complete Vision?”
She frowned, shaking her head.
“This place?” she said.
“His name’s Alex Rimple,” said Kett. “We spoke to him, he said he was sponsoring your show, lending you equipment.”
“Right,” she said, still shaking her head. “Feels like a million years ago. Alex? He gave us the kit, yeah. What do you mean, he owns this place?”
“Hang on,” said Kett. “When did you get the equipment from him?”
“Like, Saturday?” she said. “We usually use a guy, Dougie, but his stuff’s old, crap lenses. They used to be his brother’s and he never looked after them.”
“And Alex offered you new stuff?” asked Kett. “You went to him?”
“No,” she said. “He messaged me.”
“That’s not what he told us.”
“You spoke to him?” Aggie said, looking up. “Did he do this to me? Why didn’t you arrest him?”
“We will,” said Kett. “He led us here. He invited us here. Why?”
Aggie’s brow furrowed. She stared at the bottle in her hands as if it might help her make sense of it.
“Did you see him in the warehouse?” Kett asked.
“No, it was just her,” she spat.
“But you met with Rimple when you collected the gear? In his shop?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said.
“Can you describe him?”
“No. He was just a guy.”
“Old? Young? Tall? Short?”
“I can’t remember. I wasn’t really looking. I just wanted the kit.”
“Did you speak to him? Did he say anything unusual?”
“No. He was just… like I said, I just wanted the kit.”
“Did he say anything else at all?”
Nothing.
“Okay,” said Kett. His legs were threatening to cramp so he shifted onto his knees. “So you drove out to East Somerton yesterday morning. You, Matt and Charlie, right?”
“We don’t usually have Charlie,” said Aggie, a flash of irritation crossing her filthy face. “But Dougie couldn’t do it, he had to go see his mum or something.”
“The three of you drive out in your car, you get there just before eight.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We were running late. We found the church, set up.”
“And there was no sign of anyone else there? No other cars?”
“No,” she said, although the colour was draining from her fast. “We started filming, doing our thing, then… then Charlie said she’d seen something. She…”
She turned to Kett, her eyes dark.
“You found the head?”
“We did,” said Kett.
“It was real?”
He didn’t answer, but she found the truth in his silence. She put a hand to her mouth, shaking her head.
“I thought it was him,” she said, speaking through her fingers.
“Alex?”
“Yeah, I thought he’d set it up to make the episode look good, like to give us a boost or something. All the good stuff on YouTube has shocks and surprises like that, you know? But it… it was real? Who was it?”
“What happened after you found the head?” said Kett, dodging the question.
Aggie’s face twisted into a mask of misery.
“She did. She happened. She came out of nowhere, she hit Charlie and then…” She swallowed, her eyes bulging. “I tried to help, I wanted to… But she was so fast, and so strong. She grabbed me, she…”
Her hands flexed around the water bottle like she was choking it. The wounds on her face looked worse than ever in the half-light of the car.
“She was so strong, I couldn’t fight her. She pushed me down and hit me, she hit me, over and over, in the face. I… I didn’t know what was going to happen. It was so fast, she tied me up, she…”
Aggie made a noise like she was going to vomit, and Savage rested a hand on top of hers until she’d recovered.
“Just a little longer,” he said. “She tied you up?”
“She tied me up, my hands, my feet. Then she lifted me like I was nothing, she picked me up and carried me… I was screaming for Matt, he wasn’t there, he fucking ran. And she carried me to the road. There was this car there, and she put me in the boot. In the boot. I couldn’t breathe, I…”
She gagged again.
“You want to come out of there?” Kett asked. “Get some fresh air?”
Her head swayed from side to side, but all she vomited out were words.
“I couldn’t breathe, and she was going so fast I kept sliding around, cracking my head. But I remembered this TV show I’d watched. Somebody was kidnapped and they were in the boot and they kicked out the light, managed to signal to the police. So I… I kept my head, pulled up the cloth bit, found the light and I managed to pop it loose. There was some ribbon in there, I used that.”
“We saw it,” said Kett. “You did good.”
“You saw it?” she echoed, her face twisting into an expression of abject misery. “Then why didn’t you get me out?”
“We saw it on a camera,” said Savage. “We didn’t know where you were. But it’s how we found out about Bianca, and how we got to you here. I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.”
Aggie was still shaking her head.
“You should have found me,” she said. “You took too long. It’s not fair.”
“Did the woman bring you straight here?” asked Kett.
Aggie looked through the windscreen as if she couldn’t remember where she was.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “We stopped twice, and both times she got out. I heard her walking off and I tried to get out, tried to kick the boot open. But she wasn’t gone long enough, was she? She came back and heard me, told me to shut up or I’d lose my tongue.”
She broke down, a sob exploding from her.
“Then we were driving again,” she said, scrubbing her face. “When she opened the boot we were inside, in there, and she had a knife, a big one. She said… I can’t remember what she said, she still had the mask on, she…”
“You’re sure it was the same woman we found with you upstairs?” said Kett. “It wasn’t somebody else wearing the mask?”
“It was her,” said Aggie, still speaking through tears, her voice hitching. “I could smell her. Same stink, same voice, too. She said if I did what she said she’d let me go, I remember now. She said if I stayed with her for forty-eight hours, if I didn’t try to escape, she’d let me go and she wouldn’t hurt me.”
“You believed her?”
“Fucking choice did I have?” she spat. “She had a knife, she was so strong. I got out of the boot and she made me go up the stairs. Put me in a cage. A fucking cage. Gave me water, and some clothes—these clothes—because I’d…”
She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to.
“She said forty-eight hours?” asked Kett. “So she needed you there until after your birthday was over?”
Aggie shrugged, staring at the bottle again.
“Did she say why? Did she say anything at all?”
“No. But I heard her on the phone, heard her saying stuff. Saying all this shit about the devil.”
“The devil,” said Kett when she didn’t go on.
“I didn’t listen. Couldn’t listen. I was too scared. She said nobody would find me here. She kept talking about the devil, and evil. That’s what she kept saying: evil.”
“Evil?” said Kett, and he found himself thinking about what had happened when he’d arrived home last night, Evie running away down the corridor.
Daddy, help me, Mummy’s evil and she’s trying to kill me.
“Yeah,” Aggie said, bringing him back. “All she said to me was to be quiet, so I was. Didn’t dare make a noise, not even when you lot came in, in case it was a trick. Didn’t know how long I was in there, because there were no windows. Felt like forever, but it can’t have been, if today’s my birthday.”
“Was the woman in there with you all this time?” asked Kett.
