Scare Me (29 page)

 

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

 
 

Carla opened her mouth, but the words couldn't form. She sat upright.

“Mrs Frost?”

She propelled herself out of the boot, rooting her legs to the car park for fear of being shut in again. Her leg skated out to one side and the security guard supported her.

“I was just coming off my shift and heard you.”

She coughed and tasted the blood in her mouth again. “Anwar locked me in,” she croaked.

The security guard nodded uncertainly.

“I have to go, but call the police immediately and let them know what happened. Anwar Iman,” she repeated for his benefit. She'd recognised the sleeves of his olive suit and his tanned hands. It was his car she'd been locked inside.

“But Mr Iman is here.” The security guard nodded behind her.

She turned from the security guard to where Anwar was leaning apprehensively against a concrete pillar clutching her handbag.

“I'm sorry, Carla.” His palms were out again, like he was anticipating aggression.

Carla yanked her arm from the security guard's grasp. “Anwar?”

“I was acting under Will's instructions.” Her incomprehension prompted him further. “He called me. Told me to stop you from leaving. After you'd thrown me out. You'd taken my pass so I had to wait for you here. He knew you'd try to use his car.”

Will had known she'd make her own decision and had tried to intercept her using Anwar. She didn't have the energy to be angry with him. “You know what's happening?” she whispered through vocal cords that felt frayed.

Anwar shook his head once. “Just that it was a matter of life and death and that I had to do everything in my power to keep you here. Please… tell me what this is all about.”

There was no time for further exchange. Even though his actions had been misguided, he'd been protecting her for Will. She made for the exit, but Anwar blocked her path.

“Carla, I can't let you go.”

“Anwar, step aside,” she said, meeting his eye.

 

The summer house was hot and stuffy and Poppy had been relieved to be free of her clothes. But having waited for Will to recover, she dropped the flimsy dress over her head again, arranging the thin straps on her shoulders and pulling down at the waist-high hem to straighten out the wrinkles. She slipped on her beaded bracelet, her amethyst pendant and ring. Then she re-attached her Emile Chouriet watch, the one she'd left on her mother's body.

Poppy knotted the red scarf retrieved from Strick's mouth around her neck, covering the rope burn at the base of her throat. There was no mirror, but she could see herself in multiple mobile reflections gently swaying in the draught through the door.

Will watched her from his position on the floor. She had her back to him and he could see a mottled burn mark on her right hip and blackened welts down her spine and across her buttocks.

As her figure shifted in the violet dress it evoked the purple background colour of the website. The amethyst pendant, ring and other accessories belonged to her. She hadn't lied. He'd collected them and his daughter had made it to the party.

Beyond her, on the summer house wall, was a chain of black-framed photographs. The one of Libby and Luke he'd found in Ellicott City, the baby scan from Bel Air, Carla's image from Chicago, a copy of one of the snaps of Will he'd burnt in Serangoon, the university group shot of him with Eva Lockwood that had been fixed over her bed in Dundee and, to finish the row, a pensive portrait of her. She hadn't just been taunting Will and the police with the pictures; she'd been assembling her family.

It couldn't be the truth. But the hours of the blackout he'd suffered the night he'd spent with Eva Lockwood were irretrievable. Had his first intimacy not been with Carla as he'd thought? This obscene possibility revolved in his brain.

He felt the cool metal chain cutting into his wrists and remembered Dr Ren.

She didn't turn. “As you weren't there, I thought I'd show you how I was when I came into the world.” Her voice was sedate and composed. “And the medals I've earned since.” She angled her body to display the brands and disfigurements.

Will rolled onto his back, crushing his hands. Then he painfully levered himself so he was sitting up.

She turned, biting her pronounced bottom lip. Not as if she was internally debating what to do with him, but when to do it.

“You're Eva's daughter.” He couldn't implicate himself.

Her facial reaction was almost imperceptible. “I only really got to know her these past few months. Looking after her. Taking her what she needed….”

Will recalled the drug paraphernalia in the kitchen. “She abandoned you?”

She ran her fingers round the scarf about her neck. “Who would have thought a junkie's womb would be so fertile.”

“You think I'm the father.”

She flushed then, pinpricks of red radiating at her pale cheekbones.
Your
father
.
Will couldn't bring himself to say it, couldn't accept he could be bonded by blood to the death he'd witnessed. He looked into her collected, barren expression, terrified of seeing a glimpse of himself there.

 

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

 
 

“Eva had no one else,” she continued with the same hollow tenderness. “She slept only with you at Brunel. Said too much drink meant you weren't really present at my conception. Remembered your name though. You were easy to find.”

“Eva never told me. She just disappeared.” The stunned defence was as much for his ears as hers.

“Eva decided to deal with me on her own.” She left the magnitude of what that had meant for her suspended between them for a moment. “Her recreational habits ended her studies. She'd already started training as an air stewardess when she moved up to Class A drugs.”

Will remembered what she'd said about the irony of meeting on a plane.

“She met Dr Ren during her stop-offs in Singapore. Ren wasn't as respectable then, more a back street practitioner. No surgery, but plenty of demand for his prescriptions. They had a relationship. He was only too eager to dispose of me for her.” She ran her fingers down the edge of her bare arm and touched the watch on her wrist.

Will looked round for her knife. He couldn't see it, but located the Taser on the wicker table.

“I was a premature, junkie baby born in Ren's kitchen. My mother had eclampsia and had severe seizures throughout the birth. The toxins in her system nearly killed her.” She paused, as if in respect for the woman she'd bled out on the mattress. “Dr Ren cut my umbilical with a fish knife. Then, while he helped my mother shoot up, he left me too near the stove and my blanket caught fire.

Her words evoked Ren's suffocated curses and what she'd done to him in the surgery. “Ren didn't burn like you wanted him to. I pushed him out of the fire.”

Her dark brown eyes didn't flicker, but restrained his. “Eva said I looked like something that had fallen from a burning nest.” She showed her teeth as if in affection for the description. “By the time she'd recuperated, Ren had sold me.”

Will watched her lips move, her head dipping with the words and their connotations. He sensed nothing, but the mechanism of her speech. There was no bitterness to the account. None of the words were imbued with anything more than civility.

“He sold me to a man named Li Shanchi. Shanchi used child labour in the textile factories he operated in Geylang. He called me his Poppy. I had no shortage of father figures.” She gently tapped one of the pieces of coloured glass with her fingertip so it spun on its wire. “When I was twelve I was put to work in the brothels. I watched Shanchi cave a man's head in. Soon after he helped me dispose of a customer I had to deal with myself.” She showed him the watch, offering it like a hand to kiss. “This was a birthday gift. I don't know my real birth date, but Jake decided on today.”

“Jake?”

“Jacob Franks. He was a regular visitor to Geylang. I was a profitable commodity at fourteen. I even got to leave the district when Shanchi drove me to the exclusive hotels in his car. I was blessed.”

Will's regard shifted from hers to the red scarf at her neck, he didn't want to see the memory in her eyes or the scars of her ordeal.

“Shanchi sold me to Jake. I didn't know then how much influence he had. Jake gave me a birthday and a passport. I never saw Shanchi again. I would have arranged for you to meet him too, but he died of bowel cancer in 2008.” She briefly closed her eyes as if in quiet reverence.

“Would you have murdered his family as well?”

Her features didn't fluctuate. “I lived in the Chicago apartment Jake bought me. He didn't need to imprison me there. I knew how fortunate I was. I was safe. Then I began to understand who he was. How powerful. The people he was connected to.” She paused and something guileful glimmered in her eyes. “His mistake was allowing me to educate myself. He wanted me to learn. Sometimes Jake said he thought of me as his daughter. Like he would have choked his own daughter while he sodomised her.”

Will realised he couldn't allow the revulsion of her testament to restrain him. He had to remain as removed as she was.

“For nearly a decade he showered me with what he thought I wanted. I used his money to enable myself. He even helped me locate my mother through Shanchi and Doctor Ren. But I was his currency. There was a VIP club in Chicago called the Lupus Rooms, an exclusive drop in for high-profile clientele. It was how Jake met Holt Amberson and Richard Strick. A lot of men came to visit me at the apartment. Faces without names; I learnt how to block out a new sort of pain there.”

If she was his daughter how could Will have prevented what had happened? How could he have when he didn't know she existed?

“Amberson and Strick were regulars. Always called when they were in town. Amberson used to stub cigarettes out on my spine. Strick liked to watch Monro slowly fracture my arms with a G-clamp.” She offhandedly itemised the abuse, a treadmill that had become the everyday. “I left one of the recordings at Monro's place for you.” She worded it as an enquiry, as if soliciting approval for its contents.

The footage the two bodies had been sat in front of in the lounge – Monro had been behind the mask. It was her screams of agony that had led him into the room.

“I ran out on Jake five months ago. He'd given me insight. I'd extracted as much as I could from his intellect. I didn't need him any more.”

Will could still hear the sound of his empty skull as he'd pulled out the polythene package of silk she now wore on her body.

“He panicked when I killed Amberson and Strick. He was in town for the Alper's Benefit so I knew he would try to dispose of the rest of the discs. There were hundreds of them. They sat on the shelves right next to all the books he bought for me about political science and philosophy.”

Will understood now that every spark of who she was had been systematically ground out. But there was no doubt in his mind. What she'd forced the people she believed wronged her to endure was the work of a calculating monster. “And their abuse justifies the deaths of innocent women and children,” he said. He thought of Eva and all the blood leading back to a night he couldn't remember.

“How could men like that live at the bosom of their families and never be suspected? They were all in denial. They didn't think twice about sacrificing my innocence.”

How could she be so contained? Will guessed it was the only way she'd survived, hiding within the abused vessel of herself. He was back in the Monro house, controlling his limbs from a place removed from the horror he witnessed, moving his legs up the stairs.

“I met Amberson's son online. Tried to see past the father that had visited me in the apartment. But there was the same predator. That's when I decided they all had to be rubbed out. Every trace. They were inhuman.”

“No human being could possibly take lives in the way you have.” He met her eye now, found his own brown irises there.

“Those men did. All principled members of society, but they needed somebody like me. The civilised can't function without having their real nature serviced. I was bred for it. A cheap fuck, it's what I started out as and what I was made to aspire to.”

Will had no answer. Her words, as carefully constructed as everything else had been, obviously led to an ultimate act of penance.

She picked up the Taser.

“So how are you going to butcher me? Do I get extra irony with my death?” He staggered upright, confronting her, a creature so far removed from him because of what had happened to her. But there was nothing in her story he could discount, nothing that allowed him to deny who she was.

“Relax.” Cordiality suffused her voice again. “Make yourself comfortable for a moment.” She was mimicking what she'd been her whole life. “Have a think about what you'd like me to do.” She held out the Taser and smiled, but her lips hardened white.

Will stepped back and dropped onto the couch. Once he was seated, she jabbed his chest. His body stiffened into painful paralysis again.

 

CHAPTER FIFTY- SEVEN

 
 

Will trembled as he watched Poppy wander out of the summer house and sit with her back to him on the step. The breeze picked up her hair and she wiped one side of it behind her ear.

“I'll let you decide. Summon Carla or I'll give the word for Libby to die like her boyfriend,” she proposed matter-of-factly.

He couldn't speak; his jaw was still locked against the convulsions.

“You can make the call to your wife or not. Your choice.” The fringe of her hair lifted as she blew breath into her face to cool herself down. She stood and moved out of sight and into the garden.

Will remained immobile. The pieces of mirror and coloured glass jangled in the breeze.

The tremors in his body gradually subsided and he flexed his arms against the chain. If he could get upright he could run at her when she came back through the door. But what would that achieve? He still had to do exactly as she asked.

How could he bring Carla here? He wondered if Anwar had got to her in time. He prayed she wouldn't pick up when he called. Maybe he could play for time that way.

Then he heard a familiar sound, the soft boom and cleaving of the Longranger's rotor blades. The noise intensified. He got to his feet and walked to the doorway to watch it land. Birds dispersed as it disappeared behind the ring of yews and then took quickly off again.

He waited. The crows returned noisily to their branches and it reminded him of the flies that had swarmed around the bodies of the Ambersons. Moments later, Carla emerged from the perimeter of the trees striding purposefully. She'd sent the pilot back. They were alone.

“I'll welcome her.” Poppy was stood beside him, watching her at the same time.

 

The wire scored the skin on Tam's scalp and then tightened around his throat as he slid his head clean through the gap and it flapped into place. He quickly turned back to check Skinny Man's position. He was still motionless. But now Tam was trapped. His shoulders were too wide to fit and he couldn't pull his head back inside.

Chicken claws scratched around his face and he blew dust and droppings away from his mouth. Grunting, he pushed his body against the opening, ramming his bound hands under his chin and attempting to pull his shoulder blades together to squeeze them through. Panic pounded at him, taking his last reserve of energy. All the time his feet struggled in their bonds, the coils gradually loosening at his ankles.

He was too big. He couldn't move either way now.

 

“No.” The word was dry in Carla's mouth as she contemplated the length of chain in Poppy's hands.

From his position seated back on the summer house couch, Will saw Poppy's fingers tighten on the Taser. “Do as she says.”

Carla didn't move; her face balefully analysed Poppy's.

“My father, I've shown respect for.” She nodded at Will. “I'd like to do the same for you.” Her hand lifted toward Carla.

“Do as she says!” Will yelled.

Poppy's arm halted an inch away, the blue electric charge flickering between the contacts.

Carla slowly held her hands out, wrists against each other.

Poppy bound them tight with chain. Carla gasped as the link tightened.

“You're cutting off her circulation.” He was still angry that Carla had endangered herself. Anwar had promised to do everything in his power to hold her.

Poppy indicated the couch and Carla perched on the edge of the cushion. Poppy held the Taser to her chest and gestured for her to sit back.

Carla complied. “Father? What the hell is she talking about?” Her voice was spent and hoarse. She continued to glare at Poppy. When Will didn't reply she turned slowly to meet his gaze.

He didn't need to utter a word. He saw the realisation register.

Horror swept her face, disabling the aggression there. “Eva?”

He nodded once.

Poppy waited for her gaze to return to hers. “Yes, a real daughter.” She bent low to fix Will's eyes. “Help me understand. My life is thrown away and then you adopt Libby. How can you care for a child who's not even your own flesh and blood?”