Cucumber Coolie (13 page)

“Police?” Martha whispered.

I nodded, and kept on moving.

I took a peep inside the first door on the left, which was ajar and over-glossed. Looked like a lounge area. This room was the complete opposite to the hallway—stacked with old clocks, dusty antiques, paintings, photographs. A little black CRT television with an aerial above it sat in the corner, and a portable Sudoku machine on the sofa.

God, people actually
bought
Sudoku machines?

I needed a menthol sweet to get my head around why anyone would buy a machine dedicated to bloody Sudoku when they could just go out and buy a multitasking tablet computer.

I moved away from the lounge door and got closer to the next door on the left. This was where the mumbling voices were coming from. I squinted. Tried to hear what the voices were saying, as I got closer and closer. Martha stayed beside me.

There was a crack at the side of the door. A crack, that I could just about see movement through.

I took in a deep breath. Felt my heart racing.

I had to see what was inside.

I had to know.

I leaned in towards the crack in the door. The closer I got, the more I could see.

An officer, all dressed in navy blue.

No, two officers. Both standing beside a large glass patio door.

And…

Wait.

Was that a third person?

I crept closer. Got so close to the crack in the door that I was almost pressed right up to it.

I almost threw myself right in the room when I realised the bald-headed guy in there with them was Damon Watts himself.

I stopped when I realised he was dead.

I moved away, the image of Damon Watts fresh in my mind.

He was hanging from a chandelier. He was only a few feet above ground, a plastic stool kicked from underneath him, so he must’ve strangled there for quite some time.

His glassy eyes.

His pale, stubbly skin.

“Somehow I don’t think Damon Watts is Hose,” I said, thinking aloud to Martha.

“Then what…”

Martha stopped speaking when she saw what I saw, heard what I heard.

The police officers coming out of the back room and in our direction.

I froze. Froze on the spot, then looked around. There was a door behind us under the stairs. We had to hide. We couldn’t be seen in here. I could get arrested for interfering with a crime scene. Or worse—attributed for the crime. The local police were inept, which meant they were unpredictable, and any opportunity to feign battling crime, they’d leap on it like a horny dog on a teddy bear.

And with around eleven hours left, I couldn’t let that happen.

I rushed over to the closed door opposite. Grabbed the rusty round handle, struggled to open it up, the voices and the footsteps getting closer.

“Shit. Shit.”

And then it pinged open and I was greeted with a wall of darkness.

A wall of darkness that didn’t matter, because anything was better than being caught out in the light.

Martha and I shuffled inside. Shut the door, engulfing ourselves in the darkness, as the police voices emerged from behind the door of the back room.

“I heard drowning’s the most painful death,” one of them said.

“No way. Burning any day. Apparently your pain receptors go all apeshit, makes you even more sensitive to the burns. Torture. Absolute torture.”

“I burned my fingernail once. It wasn’t so bad…”

The voices edged down the hallway, away from the back room, away from us. Martha and I stayed completely still in the darkness.

“Do you smell that?” Martha whispered.

Now the voices had gone, I could finally acclimatise myself with my surroundings.

There was a smell of something in the air. Something…

“Wax?”

I looked to my left. In the darkness, I became aware of a staircase. Steps, leading down to something.

Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.

I approached the steps. The closer I got, the stronger the smell got.

“Why would it smell of wax, hun? Why… what does Damon Watts have to do with José’s waxy place?”

I stepped down the first step, listened to the concrete echo.

And then I stepped onto the second.

And the third.

And the fourth.

Getting further and further into the darkness, into the unknown.

When I reached the bottom, I fiddled around for a light switch. Although I couldn’t see, I could
feel
that this was a rather large cellar.

A cellar that was hiding something.

“Got a switch, hun,” Martha whispered, still just halfway down the stairs. “Brace those computer-fried eyes of yours.”

She pressed the switch.

Light bathed the cellar.

It took me a second to focus, to really see what was in the cellar.

But once I did focus, once I saw what was in the middle of Damon Watts’ cellar, I understood.

In a horrible, gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping kind of way, the pieces of the puzzle slotted together.

TWENTY-THREE

James Scotts looks at his watch and can’t believe he still has eleven hours of fun left with Blake Dent’s bitch.

He is in the bathroom now, washing himself down for the next part of the show. He likes to stay clean. Likes to stay healthy, especially when he is torturing someone. Very important to keep the stamina up. Keep the energy levels high.

He scrubs the blood from under his nails and he can’t help but smile.

Subject C, Danielle, has been a lot of fun so far. It helps that Blake Dent went to the police. Yes, he was annoyed at that, especially because of how it affected his Ecstacia acquisition plans.

But the look on Blake’s face and the begging in his voice when James Scotts pressed the SawDoor against Danielle’s fake, wax ear?

Priceless.

He looks at himself in the mirror. Looks at his dark, floppy hair, and the circles under his eyes. He is tired, no doubt about that. All this killing is tiring work.

Pretending to be dead is even more tiring work.

He rubs a towel against his face. He wonders whether the police are close to finding Damon Watts, chief pathologist, just yet. Ah, Damon. What an absolute wet lettuce. A big help of a wet lettuce, though. Soft as shit, easy to blackmail. He’d done James Scotts a lot of good—faked a confirmation of James Scotts’ death, even created a very convincing looking photograph.

And further back, too. He’d bought all James’ equipment for him. The voice alteration device. The lock-picking tools. The Ecstacia. He really was quite a help.

Funny what lengths a pathologist can go to when you’ve blackmailed him for shagging corpses.

Professional pride was a very, very powerful thing.

He throws the towel to the side of the gloomy bathroom. Looks in his eyes again. He looks fresher. Readier.

He smiles. He is almost handsome.

He can hear Subject C shuffling around. Maybe he will get a few struggle-shots. They will make the film even more enjoyable. Even more exciting, horrifying.

He is going to be Preston’s biggest movie star.

Blake Dent might be Preston’s “hero,” but every hero needed a villain.

And James Scotts was going to make himself famous as the man who toppled the power balance. And every second of it was being documented on video. The film of a generation.

IMDb 8.9/10 would be nice.

He takes a few deep breaths. Walks into the open room where Subject C is. The second she sees him, her head shaven and her cheeks bruised and cut, her eyes widen.

He lifts the camcorder from his side. Twiddles with his vocal modifier to check it is still attached.

“Hello, Danielle,” he says.

He opens up the camcorder. Hits record. Walks towards her.

“I don’t believe I’ve introduced you to my hose yet.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I stared across the cellar at what was in front of me and let the entire bloody reality of everything sink in.

James Scotts was in the middle of the cellar.

He had a rope around his neck. His skin was pale, his eyes glassy.

Only they were glassier than they should be.

They were waxy.

“Holy shit, hun. Holy… holy shit.”

I stepped closer towards the wax model of James Scotts’ hanged body, as Martha clearly tried to get her head around this whole craziness too.

“So… So James Scotts. The—the suicide hubby. He’s—he’s—”

“He’s Hose, yeah,” I said. I rubbed my finger against the smooth wax of James Scotts’ fake body.

James Scotts’ fake body, which hung in the cellar of chief pathologist Damon Watts.

Martha joined me. She plucked away some of the wax with her long fingernails. The cellar stunk of wax, like a giant candle had dripped all over the place.

“So… So Damon. He—he brought James Scotts here?”

“James Scotts is alive. He’s out there. He’s Hose. I don’t think this wax model of James Scotts was ever even at the mortuary, or at the station.”

“But how does someone get away with that?”

I shrugged. Walked around the back of James Scotts’ waxwork body. “You know the local police, Martha. Security checks aren’t their forté.”

Martha sighed. Shook her head. Truth be told, it was weird for me too. Absolutely batshit crazy.

But I had no doubts that James Scotts was Hose. That the note intended to point me towards José’s Waxworks.

That, somehow, it was then supposed to lead me here.

Following the breadcrumbs. I hoped to God I didn’t have many more to follow.

Unless they were made of chocolate.

“Why would he do this, though?”

“James Scotts? Why would anyone do anything like this?”

“Not James, no. Damon Watts, the pathologist. Why would he do
anything
for a nutbag like Scotts? He’s… he had a job. A good secure job, not that seeing to dead bodies is my cuppa.”

I finished circling the wax model of James Scotts. Crazily impressive piece of artwork. James Scotts was clearly a talented guy. “Sometimes people aren’t all what they seem on the outside. They’ve got skeletons in their closet.”

“Well hello Mr. Philosophical. Since when did you go all Sigmund Freud on me?”

I looked at my watch. 3.15. “Since Dani got kidnapped, probably.”

Martha didn’t have a wisecrack response to that one.

I got back to the bottom of the stairs. I hadn’t felt without stress for a hell of a long time now. But weirdly, right now, I felt like a weird weight had lifted off my shoulders.

Sure, I wasn’t at the end of the journey yet. But at least I’d found the path.

I just had to get to the end of it in the next ten hours and forty-five minutes.

“We should get Lenny down here,” Martha said. “Get the police to—”

“The police will find it,” I said.

Martha looked at me. Narrowed her eyes. “Blake, hun, this is it. We’ve got the answer to who kidnapped Danielle, right here. We can get him.”

“We can report him and we can put out APBs or whatever the bloody British equivalent is, sure. But then we piss Hose—sorry, James Scotts—off. I break the rules of his little ‘game.’ The second I involve the police again, he’ll kill Danielle. Just like that.”

“So you’re just suggesting we sit around and do nothing?” Martha said. Her voice echoed against the cellar walls.

I smiled at her. “Not nothing, Martha. Definitely not…”

I stopped talking when I heard the cellar door creak open.

“Quick!” I said.

I rushed over to the other side of the cellar. Threw open the rusty metal door of a locker, stepped inside it. Martha did the same with the one beside me.

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs as I edged back inside the tight squeeze of a locker. There were vents that I could see through, and I hoped to shit the police officers couldn’t see through them in turn.

Martha and I, we couldn’t be caught here. We couldn’t be found, not now. Not with what we had to do.

Not with what I knew I had to do.

“But have you ever seen Captain America 2? Hands
down
the best Marvel film,” the first officer, a chubby short haired-ginger, said.

“Uh-uh,” the black female officer behind him said. “None of that Captain White America shit. What’s with all the Avengers being white anyway? That not racist or… Holy shit.”

The pair of them stopped their chitchat and stared at the waxwork model of James Scotts in front of them.

“Wait, isn’t that…?”

“That’s the dude who topped himself, right? The one with the kid? All that videotape shit?”

They rushed over to him.

“But if he isn’t… shit. He’s solid!” the guy said.

“What’you mean solid?”

“He’s… he’s like falling to bits.”

The woman frowned at him and touched him.

Her face dropped.

“Shit. This ain’t no real man. He’s… like, wax and shit.”

I held my breath. Held the metal opening to the locker real tight. I couldn’t budge. This locker was barely big enough to fit me in. Any twitch and… bam.

The two officers called in their findings. Shit. Gave me and Martha little amount of time to get out of here. If the officers left this place at all.

I listened to my watch ticking away.

Time was running out.

“Holy shit. Right there.”

When I heard the male police officer’s voice, I knew right away I was screwed.

He was looking right at me. Beady, piggy eyes stared right at the opening of the locker.

I kept still regardless. Kept still, held my breath so much I went dizzy, as he got closer and closer.

I thought about what I was going to say. What my excuse for being here was going to be. How the hell I was going to get out of this one without idiot Lenny to bail me out.

The officer stopped right in front of the locker. I could smell the cheese and onion crisps on his breath.

“This Megan Fox poster is damned
hot
,” he said.

He yanked something—a poster—off the front of the locker and walked away grinning and whistling.

“Filthy bastard, Molfer,” the other officer said. “Absolute dirt.”

The pair of them disappeared up the stairs of the cellar, switched off the light when they got halfway.