Authors: Tom Bale
R
ob slept badly
on Monday night. A keen wind was blowing, causing the roof to creak and rattle; sounds he’d once regarded as benign, even cosy, now laced his dreams with anxiety. At one point the house was besieged by shadowy figures; at a safe distance the boy on the bike watched impassively, ignoring Rob’s plea to fetch help.
Dawn Avery’s warning that there might be no resolution had cast a shadow over the evening. Rob, though, had decided that it was essential to rule out Jason Dennehy’s involvement. He’d sent the man a text, but hadn’t had a reply when he went to bed.
At about two fifteen he was woken by a noise that seemed different to the rest – more deliberate – though of course it had faded before he was properly awake.
He sat up, groggily. The house had an alarm system, installed by the previous owners. The internal movement sensors often malfunctioned, so Rob tended not to activate them at night. But the magnetic contacts on the doors and windows ought to be operating, giving them some warning if an intruder broke in.
Fetching a cricket bat from Evan’s room, he looked in on the other bedrooms and made sure all the windows were shut. Then he went downstairs, pausing every couple of steps. The wind blew in gusts, causing a low-pitched moan as it pushed against the roof.
Rob prowled from room to room, but there was nothing out of place. Then, as he was entering the kitchen, he heard it again – a loud clattering noise, like someone falling against the fence.
Exactly what he’d heard yesterday afternoon.
After peering, uselessly, into the gloom, he unlocked the doors and stepped on to the terrace. He was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, but the wind that buffeted him didn’t feel cold at all; the air was rich with the scent of honeysuckle and – he didn’t think he was imagining it – a tang of the sea.
The garden seemed to be deserted, though there was some kind of small animal snuffling in the bushes to his right. Then, during a sudden lull in the wind, he heard a high-pitched creak and caught movement straight ahead.
The gate was swinging open.
His first reaction was to raise the bat. Heart racing, he turned and checked all around. He remembered locking the gate after the police had left, and no one had come out here during the evening. Had someone climbed the fence and then opened the gate to get out?
Before it could slam again, Rob hurried across the lawn and trapped the gate with his foot. There were clouds scudding across the moon, dimming its pale light and turning the acres of open ground into a silvery alien landscape, dotted with mysterious clumps of shadow. To Rob’s fevered imagination, the hissing of the wind in the trees sounded like voices, whispering in collusion against him.
T
here was nothing to see
, so he shut the gate and pushed the bolts home. Then, as he turned towards the house, he heard a shriek.
Wendy.
He sprinted across the garden and saw her in the living room, looking terrified.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I panicked because you were gone. And then I saw the door open. . .’
‘Sorry, that was stupid of me.’
As he entered the room he noticed something in her hand: a small white square. Wendy caught him staring at it, and said, ‘I found this on the mat.’ She indicated the garden. ‘What were you doing?’
He struggled to focus on her question. ‘The gate was open, banging in the wind.’
‘Didn’t you shut it earlier?’
‘I thought I had.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off the envelope. ‘We’d better open that.’
Wendy looked down as if she’d forgotten what she was holding. His tone had probably betrayed that he knew what it was, but she said nothing as she took out a slip of paper. She read the message and handed it to Rob. As with yesterday’s, it was short and to the point:
YOU KILLED HIM
Rob was frozen for a minute: he couldn’t move, or speak, or think.
Wendy snapped him out of it: ‘What is this?’
‘Hold on.’ He put the cricket bat down and fetched the other note. Wendy seemed to tremble as she studied it.
‘When were you going to tell me about this?’
‘I found it last night, but I didn’t want to—’
‘
What?
Why haven’t you given it to the police?’
‘I didn’t think it would achieve anything.’
‘It’s not just your decision to make.’ She hadn’t raised her voice, but there were tears in her eyes. ‘I live here, too, Rob.’
For now
. The words almost slipped out, and thank God he managed to stop himself. But Wendy was glaring at him, her eyes narrow with suspicion.
‘Do you know who sent them?’
‘Of course not! How could I?’ He was genuinely offended by the question, and that acted to take the sting out of the conversation.
‘I don’t know.’ Restlessly, she thrust the note back at him. ‘We have to do something. They’re accusing us of killing him.’
Rob’s mind was in such turmoil that he could only mutter: ‘Who?’
‘The man on Sunday.’ She gave him a look. ‘Who else would it be?’
‘No, yeah, sorry.’ He scratched his head, then yawned. ‘Let’s go back to bed, talk about this in the morning.’
First he tapped a code into the alarm control, activating the room sensors. Even a false alarm would be better than getting caught unawares, he thought.
Not a word was spoken as he got into bed. Wendy immediately turned her back on him. Lying awake, Rob was conscious of the debilitating fear, slowly increasing its grip on his thought processes. If there was an enemy out there, then a Rob Turner at twenty, thirty – even at forty – would have liked his chances in a fair fight against anyone. But with fifty just around the corner, perhaps it was natural that he wouldn’t have the same level of confidence, or bravado.
As he lay there in the dark, he was forced to contemplate that his strength and courage might be ebbing away, leaving him ill-prepared to defend his family.
T
he second challenge
was more ambitious. It was outside, this time, at a location that offered no real cover. You were exposed to the risks of being seen, challenged, chased away.
You accepted those risks. By now you were committed. Devoted. Compelled to do whatever you were asked.
The tools required on this occasion were easy to source: a strong pair of gloves and a concrete paving slab, the latter favoured for its greater density over the original suggestion of a cement block.
You formed a plan. Roles were assigned, escape routes plotted and memorised.
The location was a busy stretch of motorway, close to Southampton. The precise site for the attack depended on a number of factors. First, there had to be a bridge crossing the motorway. The traffic volumes had to be high, but also moving fast: there was far less satisfaction to be gained from a bottleneck.
You had been instructed to produce a high-speed impact. Lots of noise and chaos.
You chose a late afternoon in winter. Fading light. Fast traffic. The rush hour.
You made the necessary calculations, carried out experiments, deployed a stopwatch and drew up plans.
Which I approved.
The vehicles below you were travelling at seventy, eighty miles per hour, some even faster than that. It came down to milliseconds, just as life, survival, so often does. A near miss or a tragedy: milliseconds.
The block almost landed on a windscreen, but the car seemed to veer slightly; perhaps the driver was spooked by a hint of movement on the bridge. The block glanced off the roof and ricocheted into another car, striking the side panels, shattering the windows and bursting into fragments. A noisy, fabulous detonation.
In truth, it was mostly harmless. But the shock of the impact had done its work, causing both of those first vehicles to lose control. One of them spun in the carriageway and came to rest sideways on to the approaching traffic. The other collided with the central reservation and formed a similar obstruction.
Two lanes out of three, blocked, impassable. In milliseconds.
There were fourteen cars, two vans and a truck involved in the crash. Nearly all contained just one person – an indictment of the wastefulness of modern travel. From this pile-up came eleven casualties: two serious injuries, including the loss of a limb, and five moderate injuries. A handful of the occupants made it out completely unscathed, even though the news footage showed significant damage to their vehicles. The triumph of modern engineering, or just sheer good luck.
In terms of the human cost, this was far more serious than the fire, and yet it received only a fraction of the attention. The local papers and TV got excited for a week or more, but it attracted almost no interest from the national media. It seems the road network is the one sphere of life where we routinely accept carnage on a scale that would be unthinkable anywhere else.
But for you, my Brood, this represented a major advance. You had caused untold pain. Blood was spilled, albeit somewhat remotely.
The next challenge had to be on a more intimate scale. Personal. Visceral. You had to cut the flesh, draw the blood, expose the meat of another human being.
I told you what I wanted.
You had to find me a victim.
T
uesday began
with a strained discussion about the notes. Wendy insisted that the police had to be informed, and in the end Rob capitulated. ‘If that’s what you think is best.’
‘I have no idea what’s best. But if something else were to happen, and we haven’t mentioned it. . .’ She shuddered. ‘Think of the trouble we could be in.’
Not much Rob could say to that. Once he got to work he texted Jason Dennehy again, saying they needed to meet. Dennehy replied but didn’t ask why, which struck Rob as suspicious. The groundworker could only spare a few minutes tomorrow at midday, but Rob would have to come to Bosham, a village south of Chichester.
Then came an encounter with the tabloid press, in the form of a snide little man who’d talked his way into the office building and buttonholed Rob in the communal kitchen area. The resulting altercation was witnessed by half a dozen staff from the accountancy firm, as well as Cerys and a couple of his own guys, who at least made themselves useful by ejecting the journalist from the building. Afterwards it was Cerys who had discreetly explained what the intruder wanted, saving Rob the trouble of having to go through it again. But it meant the cat was well and truly out of the bag.
During a break for lunch, Rob did an online search for news and soon wished he hadn’t. A couple of papers were running stories of the man having been ‘ritually abused’. Claiming to have inside knowledge from an officer on the enquiry, his wounds were compared to previous victims of satanic cults, dredging up various grisly examples, mostly from America, including Gerald Cruz, Son of Sam and Charles Manson.
That evening Rob was able to confirm with Dawn Avery that it was only lurid speculation. ‘No one on DI Powell’s team would dare leak anything, I can tell you that.’
‘But he was tortured, though?’ Rob asked. ‘So could it have been some kind of ritual?’
After a significant hesitation, and an apologetic glance at Wendy, Dawn said, ‘There’s no specific evidence, but of course we can’t rule it out at this stage.’
The detective had called in at Wendy’s request, and wanted to know how she could help. At the sight of the notes, she was briefly aghast.
‘When did you get these? Have you both been handling them?’
Rob and Wendy dropped their heads like a couple of schoolkids called to the front of the class. Wendy meekly apologised, while Rob tried to convey the confusion and uncertainty that had led him to say nothing about the first note.
Dawn looked decidedly dubious. She asked Wendy to put the notes inside an envelope. ‘God only knows if we’ll get anything from these. Fortunately, I suspect they weren’t sent by anyone involved in the crime. It’s more likely to be some troublemaker who lives close by and heard what happened.’
‘We were due to go away on Saturday,’ Wendy told her, ‘but now I’m not sure if we should.’
‘It’ll be fine.’ Dawn forced a smile. ‘Tim and I can keep an eye on the house, if you like.’
She diverted them from their anxieties with some small talk about their destination – a house on the north coast of Norfolk, which had once belonged to Wendy’s aunt; she had specified in her will that it should be used as a retreat for all her family and friends.
‘Sounds perfect.’ Dawn spoke with real longing. ‘And just think: no one up there will know anything about this.’
Once she’d gone, Rob admitted to feeling slightly less worried about the notes. Some malicious neighbour had been trying to torment them, that was all.
They passed a quiet evening together, gently multi-tasking: half an eye on the TV while Wendy played
Bejeweled
on her phone and Rob read up on ground source heat pumps. The sort of pleasantly low-key evening they had shared countless times – marred only, perhaps, by the knowledge that he’d taken far too many of them for granted.
Later, in bed, the fears came creeping back. He thought of the news reports he’d read online, the comparisons to Charles Manson and the like. You tortured to extract information, surely? Or had it been for fun, a matter of sadistic pleasure?
He thought about tomorrow. Looking Jason in the eye, and wondering if his darkest fears would be confirmed.
The worst thing was, Rob only had himself to blame.
T
he truth
about Iain Kelly had come out at the worst possible time. Faced with the banks’ refusal to tide them over, Rob had approached Jason Dennehy to see if he could borrow money from some less orthodox sources.
He couldn’t say he was unaware of the risks. He’d played poker with a few of the characters from Jason’s lawless days and had a pretty good idea of how they earned their money. But with a lot of cash sloshing around, he thought that investing some of it in a solid, reliable business might be an attractive proposition for them.
So it proved. The firm got a much needed injection of capital, and Rob was confident that he would be able to repay the loans in time. Then Kelly did a runner, and the full story came to light: not only had Iain undermined the business, but he’d also borrowed money from Jason and some of his associates.
Understandably, there was a lot of anger, not a little of it directed at Rob. To stave off demands for immediate repayment, Rob had ended up offering three of the lenders a share in the business itself. The deal was done in Jason’s name alone, with his fellow investors preferring to take a low profile.
The agreement was that Rob would strive to make the business consistently profitable – which he had more or less achieved – and then either buy them out, or perhaps sell up and take a less stressful role in the years leading to his retirement. As far as Rob was concerned that was still the plan, but he knew Jason wasn’t renowned for his patience – or his temper. And if someone had started spreading rumours that Rob wasn’t as innocent as he’d made out. . .
Then there was the matter of Iain Kelly’s death. Rob had no reason to doubt it had been anything but an accident, but he couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility that Kelly had been murdered, perhaps by one of the many people he’d swindled.
And was Rob now in their sights?
O
n Wednesday
, he woke refreshed after a surprisingly good night’s sleep. Wendy brought him a cup of tea, along with the news that there was no sign of another note. Unfortunately, anxiety about today’s meeting prevented him from feeling much relief.
To his eternal shame, Rob had never told Wendy about his deal with Jason. At the time he’d convinced himself that he was sparing her the worry, and that within a few years the debts would be quietly settled, and then forgotten. He’d had to take Cerys into his confidence, however, since he relied on her to put together the financial records needed by his accountant.
His first stop of the day was at the site of a new eight-bedroom mansion near Amesbury, where he had to review progress on the installation of a ground source heat pump – hence last night’s reading matter. The job had been assigned to two of his most experienced engineers, and a long and detailed meeting with the project’s architect confirmed that everything was on track.
All good – except that the architect had turned up an hour late. Now Rob faced a frustrating journey to Bosham, which included what felt like half a lifetime stuck behind a tractor. Never the calmest of drivers, he was in a steaming temper by the time he reached the village, twenty minutes later than planned.
A familiar Iveco flatbed was parked outside a large, secluded house with a mini-excavator and a half-filled skip on the drive. Pulling up behind the truck, Rob sent a text to say he was here. The reply came back at once: ’
Meet by the water
’
Rob got out of the car, still in a foul mood but also a little uneasy. It was a cool, windy day of squally showers, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen.
He wondered if Jason might have lured him out here, and thought, belligerently:
Bring it on
. Pumped up, his hands curled into fists as he walked the fifty yards or so to the end of the lane, where a gentle slope led down to a shallow waterway. Bosham was situated on a tidal inlet that formed part of a vast natural harbour, so the ground was flat and soggy, and you were never far from some muddy creek.
There were a few sailing boats off to his left, and a fisherman on the other side of the creek.
Potential witnesses
, Rob thought, just as a voice shouted: ‘Hey!’
He turned to see Jason Dennehy striding out from what must have been the back garden of the property he was working on. Despite the inclement weather, he was wearing dirt-encrusted cut-down jeans and a black muscle vest that showed off his huge biceps. There was a hunched, aggressive look to his posture, his bald head glistening with rain or sweat, his brow furrowed with what Rob took to be anger. His tattoos had never looked more like warpaint than they did now.
‘What’s this about, then?’ Jason demanded.
Rob felt his stomach shift: a
fight or flight response kicking in. ‘That’s what
I
want to know.’
Jason frowned as he closed the distance between them. Then came a slightly mocking smile. ‘You don’t look yourself, Rob. Something on your mind?’
He knew
. Rob suddenly felt sure of it. His instincts had been correct, and his only chance now to avoid a beating was to get in first. Without warning he threw himself forward, slamming into Jason’s body with enough force to send them both sprawling on the ground.