‘Don’t know...’ Some fumbling noises, then a hard white light lanced out, pulling a circle of detail from Helen’s bathroom. Black and white tiles, a shower curtain with cartoon characters on it, a neat array of shampoo and conditioner bottles along the edge of a salmon-pink bathroom suite. Then the beam faded to a soft yellowish glow, and darkness reclaimed most of the room.
We tried the next door: a faded bedroom, the double bed rumpled and unmade. No sign of personal items or touches in here. Helen’s prison cell was probably more homely than this.
The room next to that was another, smaller, bedroom. But where Helen’s was bare, this one was festooned with posters — boybands and popstars I’d never heard of, for the most part, with the occasional kitten-and-inspirational-quote to break up the monotony. A row of kids’ and YA books. A wicker hamper overflowing with mildewed dirty washing. A single bed with a unicorn bedspread, the sheets cold and damp to the touch. Didn’t look as if anyone had stayed here for months.
So much for catching Gordon Smith and Leah MacNeil asleep.
That left the lounge.
I crept after Shifty, following the thin waxy beam of torchlight.
The multigym’s stainless-steel framework glinted in the dark, still huge and taking up a third of the room. The same ratty furniture lurking around it. The only thing different was the living room rug. It’d been draped over the top of Helen’s coffee table, exposing the edges of a trapdoor.
Bet all the houses round here had one. Oh, some homes might be bigger than others, some might be semidetached, some might have an attic conversion, but in the end they all shared the same DNA. And that DNA included genes for a basement...
Shifty whispered out a cloudy breath. ‘Sod.’ He pulled his shoulders in. ‘We gotta go down there, don’t we?’
‘Yeah. We do.’
He turned on the spot, sweeping the torch’s beam around the room again. ‘Be the perfect place for an ambush. Soon as we’re in the basement, the trapdoor’s nailed shut and we’re stuck there while the whole place collapses.’
Right on cue, the roof growled above our heads, followed by the rattling clatter of what was probably a roof tile coming loose and being swept away.
‘OK.’ I tightened my grip on the gun, took a deep breath, and nodded.
‘Off our bloody heads...’ Shifty bent down, grabbed the ring set into the trapdoor, and pulled. The thing hinged open with a Hammer-House-of-Horror creak. He pointed the torch beam, illuminating a steep flight of wooden steps. ‘Try and not get me killed, OK?’
‘Do my best.’ The steps moaned beneath my feet as I edged my way down into the darkness.
The musty scent of a long-abandoned room mingled with sour dampness and something sharp and metallic. The air tasted of it too.
Impossible to see anything in here, but swinging my walking stick from side to side drew a hollow thunk from something on either side. Cardboard boxes?
Could really do with a light down here.
Sod.
One barely functioning hand for the walking stick, one hand for the gun. How was I supposed to work the torch on Alice’s phone at the same time?
Unless...
I unzipped my jacket, put the .22 away, then started up the torch app on Alice’s phone. Slipped it into the top pocket of my blood-stained shirt. A good inch protruded from the top, letting LED light spill out onto stacks and stacks of sagging boxes. The gun came out to play again, my breath steaming out around my head, caught in the harsh white glow.
Everything the torch beam touched jumped into focus, but everything else was completely and utterly swallowed by the dark. Inky black and impenetrable. Where the light was bright enough to see by, the beam was no wider than a beachball, but anything more than six feet away stubbornly refused to emerge from the gloom.
Still, it was enough to get a feel for the place, and where Gordon Smith’s basement had been empty — except for his killing apparatus — Helen MacNeil’s was littered with the debris of three lives. Kids’ bikes rusted away alongside collapsed boxes of plastic toys. The remains of a teddy bear going mouldy where it poked out the top of a box full of vinyl records.
No point sneaking around now — if they didn’t know we were in here, they never would.
Deep breath. ‘GORDON SMITH! ARMED POLICE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!’
The only sound was my breath and the distant mourning gale.
Then Shifty’s voice hissed down from the living room. ‘Anything?’
Back to normal volume: ‘Don’t think they’re here.’
‘Bugger.’ His heavy feet thumped down the stairs. ‘We’re too late, then. It’s...’
When I turned, he was standing with one foot on the bottom step, chin up, nostrils flaring.
‘Can you smell that? Sort of... butcher’s shoppy.’
Which probably meant Gordon Smith and Leah MacNeil had got their hands on another victim. Shifty was right: we were too late.
‘BASTARD!’ Bellowing it out, eyes screwed shut, knees bent, walking stick and gun clenched in aching fists.
And now we had yet another crime scene to manage before the damn thing fell into the North Sea.
‘Great.’ Shifty scuffed a toe through the dust. ‘You want to call it in, or sod off out of it? Either way, they’re not here.’
The rubbish didn’t fill the entire basement, Helen had left a meandering path through the boxes. Tempting though it was to get the hell out of here, it meant we’d never know who they’d killed. More importantly, the family would never know what’d happened to their child / brother / sister / parent. So I hobbled along the path, taking my little ball of bright-white light with me. Past rows and rows of long-forgotten crap, the top surface of everything clarted in a thick layer of gritty brown dirt — probably drifted down from the floorboards upstairs.
The basement opened out at the final turn. Not into a wide-open space, but a hollow, not much bigger than a double bed.
I stopped where I was and stared.
The rear wall, the one closest to the devouring waves, the one that stuck about four feet out from the crumbling headland, had a body spread-eagled against it. Her arms were tied to the floor joists of the room above; legs more than shoulder-width apart, ankles tied to the barbell from Helen’s multigym. Head hanging forward, blood... everywhere.
‘Jesus...’
Strips of skin hung from long ragged wounds, showing off the dark glistening muscle beneath, the occasional flash of bone where they’d dug deeper. A wide pool of shining burgundy seeping across the concrete floor.
I stepped closer, and slow-motion ripples spread out from my boot.
David Quinn, back in Stirling, had been bad enough, but this was much, much worse.
A muffled rumbling shook the basement and fresh dust drifted down from the floor above, shining like dying stars in the torchlight.
Cut her down. Cut her down and get her out of here.
With what? They took Joseph’s cutthroat razor off you, remember?
‘Shifty, you got a knife?’
No answer.
‘Shifty!’
Still nothing.
I jammed the gun in my pocket, reached forward, took a handful of dyed-blonde hair and pulled her head up. Nothing but hollow sockets stared back at me, but there was no mistaking that heart-shaped face, the long sharp nose, or the broad forehead.
Just like her grandmother’s.
Leah MacNeil.
47
I huffed out a breath and stepped back, letting her chin fall against her chest again.
How could Smith...? She was like a granddaughter to him. OK, so Leah was a monster, but she didn’t deserve that.