I’m awake, he’d thought. I have to be awake.
Then a ragged breathing came from the wardrobe. It seemed to loom bigger in the room. The door slowly opened and a large figure stepped out and into the light cast by the moon. It was Bryony, her face wide and now almost blackened. The telephone cord was wound tight around her neck, and she was advancing on him. Darryl had turned to get out of bed, but lying beside him, with her bloody battered head on the pillow, was the coffee bike girl, Janelle, and next to her lay Lacey and Ella. They tried to open their beaten eyes; they reached out for him with their arms… Bryony started to unwind the cord from around her neck…
* * *
Darryl woke, finally. It was pouring with rain outside, and he was drenched in sweat. He gingerly pulled back the cover and incredible pain shot down his left side. His stomach and chest were covered in clusters of yellow pustules. There were scores of them, and just moving sent pain shooting through his body. His mattress was soaked in urine.
‘Darryl,’ came a voice through the door. ‘Darryl, are you alright? You were shouting; you were shouting about Joe?’
His mother opened the door and came in.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he said, wincing in pain.
His mother went to him and stared down at the terrible rash and pustules.
‘Shingles. You’ve got shingles,’ she said incredulously. ‘Why were you shouting about your brother?’
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Beth drifted out of a disturbed sleep. A faint light came through the thick iron grate in the ceiling, and the metal vents banged in the wind, accompanied by a low moaning howl.
She was so cold, she flexed her frozen fingers bound by the chain. She touched her tongue to her arm. The bandage felt dry and a little tacky. How long had she been here? Had that freak been back when she was asleep? What if he was here, now, crouching in the shadows?
‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice echoed in the darkness and sounded strangely polite. Then despite everything she laughed. ‘Come on, Beth, he’s a complete psycho, and it’s not as if he’s going to say hello back…’
It must be morning, she thought; there was light coming from above, and there was a definite sliver of white light filtering through under the door. She remembered the last morning before she was abducted. She’d come downstairs to the kitchen, and her aunt had been on the phone with one of her friends.
‘You don’t want to get into threesomes quite yet, Derek,’ she’d said. ‘Why don’t you both try taking up a hobby, see if that brings you closer together? I’ve always wanted to learn bridge.’ Aunt Marie had smiled, and indicated that there was coffee in the pot. She’d sat on the stool, drank coffee and eaten hot buttered toast with jam, listening, laughing, as her aunt gossiped on the phone. She wondered what Aunt Marie was doing right now and missed her like crazy.
Beth tried to sit up straighter so that the chain wouldn’t dig into her neck, and she felt a strange tickling sensation in her hair. She felt her head, thinking it was a spider or a fly, when something fell from her hair and landed on her leg. She picked it up. It was the other half of the safety pin. Her hands had been above her head when she was trying to unpick the padlock. It must have fallen into her hair when it broke, and become tangled during her frantic search. She lifted the corner of the blanket beside her feet and found the other piece of the pin.
She now had a long thin piece of metal making up the sharp pin, ending in a twisted loop, and she had the remainder of the safety pin; the curved safety head which was attached to a long piece of metal.
She remembered something she had seen in one of the CSI TV shows Aunt Marie loved to watch. The character had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs, and had used a bobby pin to pick a lock: snapping it in half and using the two pieces of metal, one piece was slipped into the top part of the lock, and then another in the bottom. She still wasn’t sure how the hell it would work but this had to mean something, didn’t it?
Of course, the captive woman in CSI had broken out of the cupboard with remarkably sleek hair, and even though she’d been in there for two days, her light blue slacks were devoid of piss stains… Beth could only imagine what she looked like, and she laughed. A laugh which then turned into tears. She cursed the lack of light, and that her hands were bound together. She turned the two pieces of metal over between each of her fingers, but her hands were numb. Beth blew on her hands to warm them up.
If she could manage this, then she might have a chance to escape.
Chapter Eighty
Erika drove fast through London, blue lights and siren blaring all the way. Peterson called in for backup, giving the address for Morris Cartwright. As they reached the South Circular, it began to pelt with torrential rain. It hammered down on the roof, and the windscreen wipers could barely keep up with the deluge, but Erika pressed on.
They reached the outskirts of Dunton Green forty minutes later, just after ten a.m. It was a tiny village and very quiet. They drove through it in a matter of minutes, past a church and then the train station, a pub, and a small supermarket before the houses thinned back out to a country lane surrounded by fields. The rain continued to pound on the roof of the car, and as the road banked sharply down, Erika sped through a deep flooded patch.
‘That’s deep water there, whoa…’ said Peterson, grabbing the dashboard, and as they sped through it a spray of water engulfed the car and spilled up and over the bonnet.
Erika thought the engine might cut out but, miraculously, it didn’t.
They approached a couple of houses surrounded by fields, and Erika pulled up in the small driveway of the first. It was two semi-detached houses, and they sat in a dip amongst a vast field. A chain fence surrounded the back garden, but there was no shed, no outbuildings. It was open.
‘This is it?’ said Erika, when she turned off the engine.
‘This is the address. Confirmed by control,’ said Peterson.
‘This is a shitty little two-up-two-down,’ she said.
They got out of the car as the rain continued to pelt down, and they had to avoid a huge muddy puddle on their way to the front door.
A young messy-haired woman in tracksuit bottoms and a grubby T-shirt answered the door, with a podgy pale baby on her hip. It reminded Erika of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters films. The baby turned to look at them with big blue eyes, along with the woman whose eyes were tiny, and a little too far apart.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Are you Mrs Cartwright?’ asked Erika.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Erika Foster; this is Detective Inspector Peterson,’ said Erika, blinking in the heavy rain as they held up their warrant cards. ‘We’re looking for Morris Cartwright.’