Spider's Web (27 page)

‘I wanted to, Emily. More than anything. That’s why I used to come and watch you play. The problem was every time I saw you, I saw Jessica too.’ Gavin’s eyes moved like hands over Emily’s face. Something squirmed inside her as he went on, ‘I saw her in your mouth, your cheeks, your hair. But most of all I saw her in your eyes. The way they glittered like…’ Again, he paused to find the right words, ‘like swimming pools full of diamonds.’

The description was so cheesily over the top that Emily found herself thinking once more,
Is he for real?

‘And then this feeling would hit me.’ Emily flinched as Gavin unsheathed his hunting knife. ‘Like all I wanted was to take this out and open up my wrists. I thought time would make things easier. But it didn’t. Every year you grew to look more like Jessica and every year the feeling got stronger. Dad knows me better than anyone. I didn’t need to say anything. He saw how it was. So he made up some excuse to keep you away from me.’

‘So it wasn’t too dangerous for me to see you. It was too dangerous for you to see me.’

Gavin nodded sadly.

‘Then why do you want to be with me now?’

‘When Dad told me the police had come around asking questions, I knew Anna Young had to be behind it. And I knew it was only a matter of time before they worked out who you really were. I realised the time had come for you to learn the truth. And for us to be together, like a father and daughter should be. We have a connection nothing can break, Emily.’ Gavin moved his hand rapidly back and forth between them. ‘Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel that connection?’

Emily didn’t know what she felt. So much had happened in such a short space of time that she barely knew which way was up and which was down any more. Gavin was willing to do anything to avoid capture. That was one thing she was certain of. She couldn’t get the image of him plunging the knife into Anna out of her mind. There had been such a look in his eyes as he’d done it – a look like she’d never seen before, or ever wanted to see again.

‘I’m not going to apologise for giving you up,’ said Gavin. ‘That would make me as hypocritical as the society I’ve rejected. But I do want to make up for lost time. So I’m asking for a chance – a chance to be a father to you, a chance to call you my own.’

Asking? Emily eyed the bloodstained knife in Gavin’s hand. Was he really asking? Did she really have a choice? Would he sink the knife into her back if she tried to leave him? As these questions crossed her mind, it occurred to her that Gavin still hadn’t answered her original question. ‘You haven’t told me where my mum is.’

‘I gave her to him.’ Gavin pointed to the ignition where a keyring of a red, goat-faced man with horns dangled. ‘And in return he gave me the strength to go on.’

‘What do you mean, you gave her to him?’

He glanced tensely at a passing car. ‘There’s no more time for talking. What’s it going to be, Emily?’

As Gavin spoke, Emily noticed a tightening of his knuckles on the knife. A tremor passed through the blade. A tremor passed through her too. Suddenly she knew. He
wasn’t
asking. He lived only for himself. Took whatever he wanted. And right now he wanted her. But she didn’t want him. He made her skin crawl with the longing to be anywhere but with him. She knew too that she couldn’t let him see how she felt. She had to bury her revulsion deep. ‘OK,’ she said, and forced herself to add, ‘Dad.’

‘Dad.’ Gavin echoed the word as if it had a flavour he was uncertain of and added one of his own, ‘Daughter.’ He slid the knife back into its sheath. ‘Wait here.’

He got out of the van, unlocked a gate and approached the garage. Softly but quickly, Emily opened the passenger door. She winced at the squeaking of ill-oiled hinges. Gavin glanced towards her. For the space of a breath their eyes met. Then she was sprinting along the lane. She didn’t look to see if he was giving chase, she just pumped her arms and legs as hard as she could. Her heart lurched when, after fifteen or twenty seconds, the van’s engine flared into life. He was coming! Her eyes desperately searched for a gap in the hedge. She spotted a closed farm gate on her right about a hundred metres away. If she could just make it there she reckoned she’d have a good chance of getting away. She was young and fit. Gavin was old – or at least in his forties – and overweight. Surely she could outrun him.

Eighty metres to go. Fifty. Twenty.
Go on, go on
, her mind urged,
you’re going to make it!
Beyond the hedge was a grassy field with houses lining its far side. Houses meant people, and people meant help. As she veered towards the gate, she glimpsed the van out of the corner of her eye and knew she was wrong. She
wasn’t
going to make it. The van was almost on her. She tried to dive out of its way, but Gavin flung open the driver’s side door. It clipped her with stunning force, sending a bolt of pain through her left hip, spinning her into the gate. She rebounded onto the ground, tears clouding her vision. Clutching at the gate, she groggily fought to haul herself upright. ‘Help!’ she cried, although there was no one to hear her except Gavin.

Her voice was muffled by a hand covering her mouth. An arm encircled her waist and lifted her off her feet. ‘I didn’t want it to be this way,’ said Gavin, carrying Emily to the van. She struggled to break free, but the blow had knocked most of the strength out of her. He dumped her onto the passenger seat and climbed in beside her.

‘Liar!’ she spat at him, her voice quivering between anger and fear.

‘Nothing is true,’ Gavin stated with flat certainty. ‘
That
is the only truth.’

Keeping an iron grip on Emily with one hand, he drove to the garage and pulled inside it. He shoved Emily out of the van and she saw that the garage sheltered a white motorhome. He dragged Emily through a door into the motorhome’s living area, which was kitted out with a right-angled sofa, an electric heater and a television on a wall bracket. To the left was a small kitchen with a cooker, fridge, cupboards and drawers. Beyond that a ladder led up to a bed perched over the driver’s and passenger’s seats.

Gavin forced Emily down onto the sofa. From an overhead cupboard he took out a roll of duct tape and two pairs of plastic zip-lock handcuffs. Emily’s head was clearer now. There was a dead, throbbing sensation in her hip and leg, and her right wrist felt badly sprained from being bent back by the gate. With or without the injuries, she knew she had no chance of fighting off Gavin. Even so, she instinctively tried to push him away.

‘Please, Emily,’ he said. ‘Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.’

‘Help!’ she screamed again as he flipped her onto her stomach and twisted her arms up behind her. The plastic cuffs bit into her wrists as he drew them tight. He pulled off her pumps and did the same to her ankles, then rolled her back over. She thrashed her head from side to side as he straddled her and strapped a leather gag with what looked like a red snooker ball at its centre across her mouth. The gag smelt like old spit. After several more minutes of futile struggle, she subsided into helpless, smothered sobs.

Gavin looked down at her with a kind of mock sadness in his eyes. He stroked her hair back from her forehead, wiped away her tears. ‘Don’t cry, my daughter, my love.’ He bent close and breathed hotly into her ear, ‘My bride.’

17

When Jim reached the end of the track, he found that it was barred from the main road by a horizontal metal pole padlocked between low wooden posts. Breathing hard, a dull, squeezing sensation in his chest, he hopped over the pole and ran to his car. He glanced at the dashboard clock. It had been twelve minutes since he spoke to Reece. His colleague was still a quarter of an hour or more away. There was no time to wait for him. He floored the accelerator and swerved sharply off the road into the barrier. There was a metallic crunch as it burst inwards. Then he was juddering full-tilt along the corridor of trees, eyes peeled for turns in the track that matched Anna’s photos.

After about a mile and a half, he passed a right turn. Shortly after that he came to a crossroads, beyond which the forest abruptly changed from birch and oak to pine. Another half a mile or so brought him to a T junction. A glance at Anna’s photo told him this was the turn he wanted. As with the first photo of the track, certain identifying features – a broken branch, potholes, the position of shadows – supported his deduction that she’d been facing backwards when she took it. The track descended to a curving right-hand bend, then another right. If he’d judged it correctly, somewhere up ahead was a sharp left, then a farm gate. Less than a minute later he found what he was looking for. Maybe twenty metres beyond the turn was a gate situated on the angle of another leftwards bend. A sign read ‘PRIVATE’. As he’d suspected might be the case, a couple of hundred metres beyond it was a house – a rundown place surrounded by an equally unkempt, junk-filled garden. A rusty white Transit van made him think of Jessica Young.

Jim frowned. It was undoubtedly the same gate as in the final photo Anna had sent. But unlike in the photo, the gate was open and the padlock dangled, unlocked, from the end of a chain. Had Gavin left the house? And if he had, why hadn’t he locked the gate behind himself? Had he been in a hurry?

A Land Rover hooked up to a tarp-covered trailer was parked in the dirt driveway. He guessed Anna must have hitched a secret ride in the trailer. His frown intensified. The house’s front door was open too. A cautious man like Gavin surely wouldn’t have left his door open. Not even out here in the middle of nowhere. What the hell was going on?

His gaze combed the garden for Anna. She was nowhere to be seen. He tried phoning her. The call went straight to voicemail.
Something’s wrong
, his gut shouted.
Why would she have turned her phone off?
He took the Taser out of the glove compartment and approached the house, skirting through the trees outside the hedge. He paused briefly to peer through a gap in the hedge adjacent to the Land Rover. There was nothing new to be seen. The house’s windows were too small and dirty for him to get a good look inside them at that distance. He continued along the hedge until he came to a second gap that faced the house’s windowless side wall. To the rear of the house was a barn. He stood motionless for a few seconds, watching and listening. There was no Anna. No noise. Nothing.

He pulled aside a coil of barbed wire and slid through the hedge. Taser at the ready, he darted to the wall and crept along it. A glint drew his eyes to the ground. Scattered over the path outside the barn were the shattered pieces of two mobile phones. Was one of those phones Anna’s? Had Gavin discovered her presence? And if so, what had he done to her? His mind racing over these questions, he peered around the rear of the house. The back door was wide open too. Unlike the barn door. That was bolted and padlocked.

He sneaked a look through the kitchen window. Empty. He moved to the barn, pressed an eye to a thin gap between the door and frame. It was too dark to see anything, but he caught a faint sound like someone fighting for air. ‘Anna,’ he hissed.

‘Jim,’ came the low, wheezy reply. The instant he heard Anna’s voice, it seemed obvious what had happened – Gavin had locked her in the barn and fled, most likely taking Emily with him. It was obvious too that Gavin hadn’t simply imprisoned Anna. She sounded as though she scarcely had sufficient breath to speak.

The time for creeping around was over. Jim snatched up a stone and smashed it into the bolt until it broke loose from the frame. He yanked the door open. Sunlight streamed into the barn, and into Anna’s blinking face. He knew it was bad as soon as he saw her. Her cheeks were bluish grey. Bright-red blood was smeared around her mouth. He was already pulling out his phone as he rushed towards her.

‘Where are you hurt?’

‘Back,’ Anna gasped. ‘He stabbed me.’

A quick look at the scrap of plastic suctioned to Anna’s upper back told Jim it could prove fatal to move her. The knife had punctured a lung. If the plastic came loose, inrushing air would collapse the lung. He turned his attention to his phone, praying for a signal. There was a weak one. He punched in a number. ‘Dispatch, this is DCI Jim Monahan. I have a medical emergency. A woman with a serious knife wound to her back.’

‘What’s your location?’

Jim gave the dispatcher directions. The line was silent a moment, then the dispatcher came back on. ‘An air ambulance and ground units are on the way.’

Jim repeated this to Anna. Gasping for breath, she said, ‘Gavin’s gone… I heard an engine. He took Emily with him.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Not sure. Maybe twenty minutes.’

Jim clenched his teeth in frustration. They could be fifty or more miles away by now. ‘Do you know what he’s driving? There’s a Land Rover and a white van in front of the house.’

‘Red Escort van…’ Anna slurred, her glazed eyes rolling back in their sockets, her head lolling sideways.

Jim caught hold of her. ‘No, no, keep looking at me, Anna,’ he urged. Her eyes came back down and focused on his. ‘That’s it. Good girl. Do you know the van’s reg?’

‘No.’

‘Does Gavin still have long hair and a goatee beard?’

‘Yes, but he’s got a full beard now.’ Anna searched for oxygen and continued, ‘He was wearing camo trousers and a black t-shirt.’ She managed a small crooked smile. ‘I gave the fucker a lovebite on the left ear. Nearly tore it off.’

‘What about Emily?’

‘Black jeans. Hooded grey sweatshirt.’

Jim got back on the phone to the dispatcher. ‘The suspect fled the scene some twenty minutes ago in a red Escort van, registration unknown. He has a girl with him, possibly against her will.’ He gave Gavin and Emily’s particulars, adding, ‘Gavin Walsh is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. I need you to inform DCS John Garrett of the situation immediately.’

Jim hung up and gently took hold of Anna’s hand. It was cold and sweaty. Sweat lathered her face too from the effort of breathing. He knew it was touch and go whether she would live. And the thought of it filled him with a queasy sense that he was sliding back towards the pit he’d fallen into after Margaret’s murder. Still, his cop’s brain couldn’t help but fire questions at him. Uppermost amongst them was: had Gavin spotted Anna by chance or had he been warned of her presence? ‘What happened?’