Ebony closed her eyes and sank to the floor. How could she have messed up so badly?
She heard Danielle try and say something to her from the corner of the room.
‘You jealous?’ He danced across to Danielle and ran his fingers slowly down her body whilst she twisted from his touch.
‘Your turn will come.’
Ebony looked around the room, trying to get her bearings. There was no window. She thought they must be in the basement. Her heart sank – no way of tracking her anyway, all her devices were gone. If she was ever going to get out she had to outwit him and this place had to become as familiar to her as it was to him.
‘I’ve been waiting for them to send someone to try and trap me. I knew if I left enough clues you’d narrow it down to the college but there were so many choices in there. I wouldn’t have known for sure it was you if you hadn’t failed. You didn’t know a basic fact about your supposed home town. In the café, you didn’t get my text because you were on a different phone, which I saw you stuff into your bag. But don’t feel bad, I saw you way before that. I saw you from the bridge the day that Emily rose to the surface. For weeks I’d been coming this way and that, different routes, different viewpoints. I had a feeling something would happen that day. I felt her beginning to rise beneath the surface. I saw you walk along the towpath and you didn’t see me. You had your eyes on the man with you – Detective Inspector Dan Carter. With his expensive clothes and his black shiny hair like a raven’s. That’s all you were worried about. “I’m not your mate… you all right Guv?”’ He mimicked them both. ‘If you had walked up onto the bridge, past the press, you would have seen me. But I saw you. And you know what? I’m glad you’re here now because we are going to play a special game, just me and you and Danielle and Jenny here. Just the four of us. We have plenty of time.’
Yan walked across to the side of the room and picked up a box. He came across to Ebony and slid open a door at the front of the box. It came level with Ebony’s face. She tried hard to focus. Inside she could make out something hanging, wrapped in silk. It had a tail, an ear poking out of the white bag that wrapped it. She focused on the mouse first, its beady little eyes watched hers. Then her eyes shifted to the right and she saw the massive spider that had wrapped it in white silk. He began swinging the box in front of her face.
The spider moved to the back of the box. It began to rear and sway; in the dark she saw its bright yellow markings.
‘Tell me, Ebony, does the brown recluse spider always bite?’
‘No,’ Ebony whispered, keeping as still as possible.
‘No. That’s right,’ he said, allowing the spider to stay still in front of her face. ‘Very good, Ebony. But this isn’t the brown recluse spider, this is the jumping tree spider, highly venomous and aggressive and she…’ The spider reared onto its back legs and showed two red fangs. ‘…does.’
‘Tell me about Australia.’
‘My client…’
Christian Goddard turned to his lawyer to indicate he wanted to speak for himself.
‘Look, I’ve got nothing to hide here. I’ll tell you what I know about Yan but I’m not sure it will help. I am fond of Ebony and Danielle. If I can help I will.’
‘How did you meet Yan?’
‘In a bar in Adelaide. He was with his mother. She was a hippy type. They’d travelled the world. By the time I met them they weren’t getting on very well. His mum had a really wild side and a habit of sleeping with Yan’s mates.’
‘Including you?’
Christian shrugged. ‘Actually no – it didn’t work for me.’
‘What were you doing at the time?’
‘Drifting, working where I could. I got work in a bat sanctuary and then a zoo. That’s when I learnt about looking after pets.’
‘And Yan?’
‘They had enough money sent over by his dad to keep them going but they lived very frugally. They rented out shitty old places and lived like tramps. Yan had been brought up like that. Ever since his mum left the UK supposedly to find herself and left Yan’s dad and never came back. By the time I met Yan he was bitter and angry and seemed to be on the brink of just flying back to the UK without his mum. Then his dad died over here and it seemed to be a massive blow to him. All he ever talked about was his memories of his dad. He talked about getting back here and making up for all the lost time. He really hated his mum then.’
‘What happened to them then?’
‘I didn’t see him for a while. The next time I met him out in a bar on his own I asked after his mum. He told me she was back at the farm they were renting. She was pretty ill. He said he was waiting for her to get better then he was definitely coming back to the UK and he had inherited his dad’s house.’
‘Where – did he say?’
‘Yes, off Upper Street somewhere. I didn’t see him again until he contacted me on Facebook and I found out he was working at the college. I decided I would take a couple of courses and it just snowballed from there.’
‘So you are friends?’
Christian shook his head. ‘Not really. I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me.’
‘Would it surprise you to know that his mother died in that remote farm outside Adelaide?’
‘Not really. How?’
‘Strangled. By the time they found her she was cocooned in spiders’ webs.’
Chapter 51
Ebony’s face felt like it didn’t belong to her. The bite was throbbing. She raised her hands to touch the swelling on her face. She could feel the poison working. Her ribs were in agony when she breathed. She had passed out after killing the spider – she hadn’t meant to but her instinct was to crush it in her hand. He’d beaten her unconscious for that.
Her wrists were bound together. She must have slept. Her vision was slightly better although her face throbbed. She looked around her. The corpse he called Jenny was still hanging, mummified and cocooned, from the hook in the ceiling. As she focused on it she could see that beneath the white web there was movement – hundreds of spiders had colonized the body.
Danielle was watching her from her place, strung up by her wrists, her legs opened and chained to anchors in the floor. There was blood dripping down to her feet. Yan was in the corner of the room. A bottle of vodka was open beside him. Ebony looked at the photos on the walls. There were large prints of a young boy with a man. She recognized Yan from the photos.
‘My dad,’ he said, looking up. ‘The dad my mother never let me be with. She should have left me with him. I loved him. He would have looked after me. I could have nursed him back to health when he got ill. I never saw him again after we left. She was taking me on holiday, she said, taking me away for the summer, but we never came back and I missed all those years with my dad. Women shouldn’t have kids selfishly like that. They shouldn’t just up and leave the man who gave them that child. Women are fickle and vain and only think about themselves. They entrap a man with their looks, cover themselves in make-up, but inside they are worse than spiders, worse than the female spider for taking what they want and then destroying the mate that gave it to them.’
He looked at Ebony. He picked up the vodka and swigged it back. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t know that the police would try and trap me? I’m not going to let you stop me from finishing the game. I know that this will be my last game and I chose to end it here with you two – my last players. Danielle, you will die on my first mark… Ebony on my second.’ His laughter started deep and ended in a shrill squeal that left him doubled over and breathless. ‘We are going to play the game called “tighten the noose”.’ He got to his feet slowly – with deliberate precision he then walked across to Danielle; he walked like a ballet dancer. He took every step as if he were on stage – in a performance.