He came forward, his arm across the front of his face, using it as a battering ram. He went through me, almost lifting me off my feet, and slammed me against the wall.
‘Eric!’ he shouted and the front door burst open.
The other man headed past us and upstairs, taking two steps at a time, as if he knew exactly what he was being summoned for. Wellis shoved harder with his forearm, pressing it in against my neck, forcing my body against the wall and my head up. I tried to swing a punch, but he blocked it and arced a fist up into my guts.
It was like being hit by a train.
I shifted my weight left to right and the movement rocked him back on his heels. Only a fraction. But enough. I drove a fist into the side of his head and managed to connect with his ear. He stumbled back half a step and I jabbed a second punch – as hard as it would go – into the centre of his throat. He made a sound like air escaping from a balloon, shrinking in on himself.
But Wellis was a fighter.
He channelled everything he had into a swing, connecting with the area around my heart. It was like he’d punched through me. I hit the wall so hard and so fast the whole house seemed to shake. The door rattled in its frame. The plasterboard rippled. As I was catching my breath, he moved quickly to the holdall, unzipping it.
A second later, he had a knife.
His fingers were laced through three holes in the rubberized grip. The blade was curved, about three and a half inches long. I stepped away from him and saw, inside the holdall, more knives, some rope, handcuffs – and a white vest and jeans, both belonging to a female, dotted with blood.
‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he said, breathless. I didn’t respond. ‘Now I’m gonna have to take care of you.’
Upstairs, I could hear the other man moving around.
Quick footsteps.
Wellis edged towards me, knife out in front of him. He was forcing me back towards the kitchen, into a space where there was no exit.
‘Ade!’ the other man screamed from upstairs.
Wellis glanced behind him. An automatic reaction.
And I made my move.
From behind me I yanked out the crowbar I’d taken from the car. It was short, stubby, no more than a foot and a half long – but when it connected with the side of his head, Wellis went down like he’d been shot. His eyes rolled back; every muscle in his body turned to liquid. Then he was flat on his back on the carpet, lights out.
I turned him over on to his front.
‘Ade!’ the man shouted again from upstairs. ‘Quickly!’
Grabbing his arms, I dragged Wellis through to the kitchen and then went through the cabinets. In between a bottle of bleach and a tube of rat poison, I found a roll of duct tape. I bound Wellis’s ankles and wrists and looped the tape around his head a few times, covering his mouth. By the time I was done, he was slowly starting to come round. Eyes flickering like butterfly wings; eyeballs rolling up into his head, as if trying to tune himself back in. I had about five minutes before he returned to something like full strength.
Moving back through the hallway, I padded up the stairs. No creaks. No sound. At the top, in one of the rooms, I could see a loft hatch was open. A ladder had been pulled down and propped against the carpet. The man was halfway up, body inside the loft, legs still on the steps. As I edged in closer, I spotted something else.
Right on the edge of the loft space.
Blood.
I moved quietly into the room and stopped at the bottom of the ladder; more blood was falling from the lip of the hatch. It hit a space about half a foot from where I was standing, forming a pool on the hard, matted fibres of the carpet. The man was just standing there, looking off into the darkness at whatever was up there. Not moving now. Just breathing in and out.
‘Ade,’ he said again, but this time there was no purpose in his words, no urgency, and I realized something: he was crying. Soft sounds. Sniffs. ‘Ade,’ he said again.
I reached up, hands either side of his ankles.
‘Ade!’
He looked down, and saw me. Shock in his face. Then fear. Then anger. I grabbed his ankles and pulled him off the ladder. He fell hard and fast, cracking his head against one of the steps, before landing awkwardly right on the ball of his foot. He yelled out and collapsed. I grabbed him by the collar, got him to his feet and drove him back, into the wall. The wind whistled out of him.
‘What’s your name?’
Tears and blood on his face.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Eric.’
‘Eric what?’
‘Eric Gaishe.’
I glanced up, into the loft space. ‘What have you done, Eric?’
He sniffed. More tears in his eyes.
‘I think I killed someone.’
27
I pulled Gaishe, hobbling, to the bathroom, pushed him inside and told him to stay put. Then I returned to the spare room. Above me, the loft hatch was a big, black space. I only had a T-shirt on – nothing to cover my skin, nothing to prevent prints – so I grabbed a shirt from a nearby wardrobe, tore it in two and wrapped the material around both hands. I didn’t know what awaited me in the darkness. Not exactly. But, given this house and the people who occupied it, it couldn’t be anything good. As I started to climb, dread slithered through the pit of my stomach.
Halfway up, a moth escaped from the shadows and, at the lip of the hatch, I could see the full extent of the blood: running along the edges, soaking through into the insulation. Another rung, then another, and suddenly my head was inside the crawl space.
And I saw her.
Matted, unwashed hair. Skin stained with a mixture of grease and sweat. The woman was on her stomach, part of her face in a bed of insulation, skeletal arms out either side, legs spread. Her head was tilted towards me, one of her eyes looking up as if she’d been trying to claw her way back out of the loft. And there was blood everywhere: her face, her arms, her ribs, her legs. Thin, painful knife cuts had been used as a torture tactic, not enough to kill her, but enough to subdue her, and the rest was just bruising, everywhere, scattered all over her like spilled ink. There was a brick beside her, coated in her blood. A couple of strikes to the head from Gaishe, and then there would have been nothing but silence. No fight in her any more.
No life.
I looked at her: drawn and wan, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen. There were older bruises on her arms and legs, around her collarbone, next to her eyes and hips. I felt anger force its way up, blooming in my chest.
And then she blinked.
It was so quick, so unexpected, I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen it. I turned my head and put my ear to her mouth. And I felt it. Soft, warm breath.
Shit. She’s alive.
I thought about what I was going to do. But not for long.
Ultimately, there wasn’t a choice to make.
Using the house landline, I called for an ambulance, gave them the address and where she was in the house. ‘You’ll need police here too,’ I told them, then hung up. She hadn’t moved from her position in the attic by the time I returned to her, but her visible eye was more alert. It swivelled from left to right, as if she was trying to focus on me.
‘It’s okay. You’re going to be all right. This will all be over soon.’ I couldn’t touch her; didn’t want to leave any more evidence than I had already. ‘I need to take care of something, okay? By the time I’m done, the ambulance will be here. You’ll be all right.’
A gurgle in her throat.
‘I promise you’ll be okay.’
‘… hmmmm hurrrrrr …’
‘You’re safe now.’
‘… done lim hurd mm …’