Stop Me (17 page)

The Allan-Carlins froze and Leo could only hear the hammering at his temple. There was no exchanged glance, no need for one – their dread and guilt was sickeningly apparent.

‘What have you been told?’ Joe swallowed quickly after he’d said it as if he’d never expected to have to say the words. Although Mutatkar had no reason to lie, Leo hadn’t begun to prepare himself for this truth. Now he saw it in their faces and felt dizzy with repugnance.

Joe licked at the edge of his silver moustache. It reminded Leo of Bookwalter – guileful Bookwalter whose deceptions now paled into nothingness. He shifted from foot to foot. He was attempting damage limitation but what he was trying to conceal was still too grotesque for Leo to contemplate.

Leo looked at Maggie. She had forgotten her injured foot and was leaning against the wall, her back slowly sliding down it. She’d closed her eyes and it was like somebody had put a flame to her. Her body creased and diminished as if their terrible secret was the only thing that had filled it and that now it was out she would finally shrivel to nothing. He returned his gaze to Joe.

He seemed oblivious to Maggie and was still waiting for an answer. ‘Leo? What do you think you know?’

‘Everything you didn’t want Mutatkar to tell me.’

Something passed across Joe’s eyes that left them dull, a realisation that there was no exit.

‘You were having him watched as well as me. Couldn’t afford to have us meet, could you?’

Joe closed his eyes and ran his hand over his patent baldness. ‘Mutatkar was a hopeless addict.’ He said it as if he’d rehearsed it with himself a hundred times over.

‘Very convenient, seeing as you blackmailed him into helping you by threatening to expose his habit.’

Joe seemed to wince at this. ‘He was my friend…once. But he was dead to everyone long before I involved him in this mess.’

‘Take me to her.’ But as Leo said it he realised that after months of waiting it was the last thing he wanted anyone to do.

‘What did you do to Parag?’ Maggie’s eyes were open again and locked onto Joe.

‘He was going to expose us, Maggie. I had to stop him. I couldn’t allow him…not after everything we’d been through.’ His irritable tone dismissed her accusation as an irrelevance.

‘You were having him watched?’ she slurred, whatever she’d been drinking now getting the better of her.

Leo replied. ‘And me as well…although I’ve always thought it was the police. When Joe found out Mutatkar had tried to contact me he had him killed then had his car rolled into traffic to make it look like an accident.’

Maggie’s mouth opened and choked at Joe. ‘What about Dakini…and Sabri?’ Her vocal cords sounded like they were rusting away.

Joe’s eyelids flickered and he ran his hand over his baldness again. ‘Parag had his own death wish. It was always going to end in tears for them. I had to protect us.’ Again it sounded like a mantra…something that Joe had said so many times to himself that it was now flat and emotionless.

‘And what did we have left to protect, Joe…the honour of our son?’

Joe was suddenly apoplectic with rage. ‘We both did what we thought was right!’

‘Like wringing the life from him!’ She spat it back at him.

The atmosphere vibrated with her outburst and Leo felt its significance settle on all three of them.

‘It was the fall that killed Louis,’ Joe insisted through a clenched jaw – a defence that had clearly long been worn out. ‘He tried to push me down the stairs first. You saw it, Maggie.’

‘Yes, Joe – you were trying to defend yourself against a nine stone man.’ Maggie looked dazed and it was like she was arguing under hypnosis.

‘And that’s when you decided to pick up the phone to Doctor Mutatkar.’ Leo filled the silence with what he’d learnt from the dictaphone.

Joe looked at Leo as if he’d forgotten he was there. ‘Louis was still alive when he arrived but Parag couldn’t save him. I couldn’t believe that he couldn’t save him.’ Exasperation glowed on his features. ‘We may as well have not involved him.’

‘But then he had no choice – particularly when you threatened to disclose his addiction.’ Leo recalled how Joe used to circle from a distance whenever he visited. ‘I always thought that you’d taken down the photos of Louis because they were too painful to bear. Of course they were – but not for the reasons I always assumed. And so here I am with the people I mourned with, thinking that Laura’s disappearance and the reward money you offered was the reason your son was taken. But he died here…at your hands.’

Joe screwed his eyes shut and his breath wavered as he inhaled it through his anger.

‘It was an accident!’ Leo bellowed and watched them
both flinch. ‘Why couldn’t you have gone to the police? Do I honestly have to accept that everything I’ve been through was because you couldn’t bring yourself to accept your son’s homosexuality?’

Joe’s cheeks puffed up and he exhaled a strange laugh. He opened his eyes and there was a new gleam there, a realisation that whatever the consequences were, here was an opportunity to divulge something that would only compound what Mutatkar had whispered into Leo’s ears. ‘I can understand Parag’s horror at allowing himself to become involved in the disposal of the body. But Parag never knew the real reason I couldn’t have possibly gone to the police when Louis died.’

‘Joe!’ The name was like a bludgeon and Maggie’s tone was suddenly guttural and resonant.

Joe ignored her. ‘We’d accepted Louis’ lifestyle since he was seventeen. It was never a secret to us.’ Joe inhaled through his nostrils and closed his eyes momentarily. ‘What we didn’t know was that our only flesh and blood who was still living under our roof…was a calculating psychopath.’ Joe briefly allowed the silence to settle before continuing. ‘Until he came home one night and told us that he’d got involved with a female prostitute and that some sex games had gone too far. At first we didn’t understand what a gay man was doing with a female prostitute – until it turned out it wasn’t about sex at all. He hated women and killing them fulfilled some sick fantasy.’

‘No more, Joe.’ But her protest was weary – resigned to accepting that too much had already been said.

‘Said he’d picked her up in his car and they’d parked up before things got out of hand. We panicked. At that stage we didn’t ask him what he was doing with a woman. He told us she’d threatened him at knifepoint for his money and he’d stabbed her in the struggle. He drove the body here but said he’d decided to give himself up. He had no intention of doing so but we believed him. Said we’d help him cover up. He knew we would – knew what our attitude would be. Why sacrifice his life over curiosity gone wrong with a prostitute? She was dead, he was alive; it had been a terrible accident.’ Joe moved his lips around a solid bitterness. ‘A German woman had just been murdered by the Vacation Killer. It was still in the news. So we sent an email like the ones they’d been talking about and I…’ He swallowed. ‘Then we sent the parcel to the police…like the Vacation Killer had been doing. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to misdirect.’

‘Louis murdered Teresa Strickland?’

‘We only realised it hadn’t been an accident when Vicky Cordingley died. He kept their underwear as trophies. Maggie found them in his room. He knifed Cordingley in the same way. Our son liked hurting girls. And he knew we’d still have to help him.’

‘I wanted to go to the police,’ Maggie said to the wall opposite her.

‘And what would have been the point in that?’ Joe snapped. ‘We were all implicated. We had to do exactly what we did before.’

‘Like clockwork.’ Her words were dried thin.

‘Louis told us it was going to stop but I knew it wouldn’t. We argued…we fought…and he fell down the stairs. That’s when I first telephoned Parag. He couldn’t save him though. Louis had broken his spine.’

‘You pushed him,’ Maggie accused.

Joe’s eyes shifted to Maggie and then back again without a glimmer. ‘So we had to cover up in the same way – using the Vacation Killer. But Laura came into the office and saw the email about Louis before it was sent.’

‘What did you do to her?’ Leo visualised himself sitting in Chevalier’s.

‘It was the last thing we expected to happen but she walked back in at the wrong time.’ There was pleading in Joe’s voice.

‘What did you do to her, Joe? Enough to justify the reward money you offered?’

But it was Maggie who answered. ‘She said she was out Christmas shopping for the afternoon. I composed the email from the Vacation Killer after she’d left. Joe had set up an untraceable email facility that we could access from anywhere. I shouldn’t have done it from work but we were short on time and I thought the office was empty. I had to make an urgent visit to the ladies;
when I came back Laura was standing in front of the monitor reading it. She had her scarf in her hand, the one she’d forgotten. I’d seen it on the back of her chair…should have thought she might come back for it. She was still clasping it when we got her back here. I could have told her that the email had been sent to me. Could easily have bluffed it…’

‘Yes…’ Joe hissed.

‘I panicked. I hit her with the Krug bottle…the one everyone put their pennies into. She’d only just emptied it and was going to use the money to buy drinks for the Christmas party. I hit her with it once and then Joe carried her down to our car and drove her back here.’

‘Drove her back here and locked her in the air raid shelter.’ Leo used Parag Mutatkar’s account that was still fresh in his ears. ‘Locked her in there but couldn’t decide what to do with her.’

‘She fell ill a few days later.’ Maggie tried to swallow a chunk of the memory. ‘We couldn’t open the door but I slipped notes under it – asking her what she needed.’

‘Did you really believe you could keep her locked in there for ever?’

Maggie didn’t shift her focus from the wall. ‘So Joe called Parag again. We knew he wouldn’t go to the police. He sedated her while she was asleep and examined her. She had hypoglycemia. She wasn’t eating any of the food we were leaving for her inside
the entrance door. He told us he could treat her. Give her injections while she was asleep.’

Leo felt a mass expanding in his chest. ‘But he couldn’t treat her, could he? And while you were making your minds up what to do with her Parag failed you again…’

But neither Joe nor Maggie were looking at him. They were both suddenly looking up at the doorway behind Leo. The hallway was suddenly bathed in light, like a flash capturing the expressions in front of him. He heard the crunch afterwards and realised it was something impacting his skull before he hit the floor unconscious.

‘How’s my timing?’

Cleaves squeezed his knuckles. They were going to balloon but he knew they weren’t broken. In the absence of a makeshift cosh he’d known the force that had been necessary to apply at the base of Leo’s skull.

Maggie was rooted to the spot in shock but Joe moved to the bottom of the stairs to sit down.

Cleaves was shaking his throbbing hand like a thermometer. ‘What do you want to do here?’

Joe rubbed his face and then clasped a hand over his baldness.

‘Looks like things are racking up for the pair of you.’ Cleaves continued.

Joe lifted his head. He clearly didn’t like the
cheerfulness in Cleaves’ tone. ‘It seems I’ll be extending our contract.’

Cleaves nodded and moved so he was standing with his feet either side of Leo’s waist. ‘Where shall I put this?’ He hoped disposing of Sharpe was going to be more straightforward than Mutatkar.

Leo knew he was somewhere dark before he opened his eyes. It was pitch black but he knew it wasn’t blindness. The bruise at the back of his skull began to hammer louder than the circulation in his ear and his eyes refused to adjust or find any shades within the solidity around him. His spine ached and it felt like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs. He felt the backs of his hands against his lips and moved them slowly apart expecting his wrists to be bound. They weren’t but they immediately struck something solid and cool in front of them.

He ran his fingers over the area and heard his suddenly animated breath bouncing back from it. He slid his palms above his head and back down again and found the same flat surface. He heard himself grunt in panic and started to push against it. His body slid back as he pushed and then it felt as if he was suspended in mid air. A second later he fell and his spine jarred with a harsh impact.

Disoriented he lay still for a few moments, feeling the invigorated pain shriek at the top of his spine.
The acoustics of his position seem to change and his irregular breaths no longer fell back on his face. There was a free flow of cooler air about him and he lifted his right hand. His knuckles butted painfully against something and he cried out. But whatever it was had an edge and he curled his fingers around it. It was a long metallic bar and above it was something soft. He felt over it and rested his fingertips on the cool, sprung surface there.

He took a few breaths and let his veins decelerate. He’d fallen from a bed and was now lying on his back on the floor below it. He calculated he must have woken on his side and pushed himself away from the wall. It was small comfort though because he still couldn’t see anything and didn’t know where he was – although he already guessed where he could be.

He rolled painfully away from the edge of the bed and onto his side. Every muscle ached awkwardly like they’d been removed and stuffed back into place. He teetered on the side of his ribs and then tipped onto his front pulling his legs in so his knees could take some of the weight.

He breathed in the cool concrete floor and didn’t doubt that he was in the air raid shelter at the bottom of Maggie and Joe’s land. It was the place they’d incarcerated Laura, the place she had spent her last days before Parag had failed to save her. This is where she’d been while he’d sat at home and at the police
station and patrolled the streets around the Opallios offices.

He was surprised to still find himself alive. Did they not have the guts to dispose of him or were they just going to leave him in here to expire in his own time? He bowed his head and started to crawl on his hands and knees anticipating his head butting into a wall or a door. The room was bound to be small but he wanted to get an idea of the layout

Let me out of here!
His brain shrieked it first and he drew breath as he prepared to retch the words from his lungs. But as he inhaled he detected a smell.

Suddenly he felt another impact on the back of his head – he’d been hit again though not half as hard as before. What was the smell though? In his unbalanced state it took him a few moments to successfully identify it. His head throbbed but it didn’t seem to matter because he’d identified the scent.

‘Laura?’

Leo wondered if he’d been drugged and if his senses were playing cruel tricks on him but as he tried to focus on his surroundings through the cacophony of pain in his head he detected a movement to his left. It was a soft almost indiscernible drag sound like somebody pulling their feet into themselves.

‘Laura,’ he said louder and held his breath. Blood coursed around his brain but he kept his lungs locked tight until he was positive he could hear somebody else
drawing air from the same direction. He screwed his eyes tight. ‘Please don’t hit me again. I’m not here to harm you.’ It wafted over him now, Laura’s breath, Laura’s scent.

‘Leo.’ The word was like a bubble, bursting wet and unformed from the back of her throat.

For a moment the pain ceased, as if something had pinched its artery and momentarily halted the flow. Leo didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes, but felt heat building behind his face. Then he crawled in the direction of the word. The first thing his finger touched was Laura’s foot. His fingers curled around the warmth through her sock and scrabbled upwards, connecting with the solid edge of her knee and clumsily striking her breast as it moved higher. His body shifted around the space she occupied and he felt a palm on his shoulder. Then his face touched the coolness of her neck, squeezing tightly against a part of it as his fingers sought her. Her nose pressed into the side of his eye and he felt her hair tangling in his fingers as he sought the back of her head.

Their bodies compacted and neither of them breathed as their arms pulled themselves harder against each other and he felt his bottom lips brush the top of her ear. They didn’t speak, just gripped themselves to each other, shoulders spasming, eyes swelling and all Leo could think of was what Maggie had said when she’d told him she’d been to see her medium.

‘She’s in a comfortable place now.’

His brain accelerated in hundreds of directions: Laura, Maggie, Joe, Mutatkar, Louis. Leo couldn’t believe how immediate the truth had always been, how close by Laura had waited as they’d watched events he had no connection to unfold on the TV in the
Allan-Carlin’s
lounge. He recalled the view through their double-glazing extending to the place she had been a prisoner since the day she’d walked back to the Opallios offices to pick up her scarf. Joe and Maggie would have had plenty of time to replace the footage from their own security cameras so it looked like Laura had never gone back.

‘Where are we?’ she whispered.

Hearing her voice, the voice that he never thought he’d hear again brought the needles back to his shoulders the way they’d prickled when he’d walked back into Chevalier’s when he knew she’d vanished. Mutatkar had said she’d died, that he hadn’t been able to administer the correct medication in time. At no point had he ever said he’d been involved in her disposal though – like he had Louis. The
Allan-Carlins
must have told him she was dead in order to guarantee his silence.

If Mutatkar had been as guilt ridden as he’d sounded in the Dictaphone recording, then it was possible he would have eventually talked. His message on the answering machine proved this. Perhaps the news
about Bonsignore’s death had prompted him to at last reveal what had happened, having believed Laura was dead and that it had been his fault. ‘We’re getting out of here.’ He felt the rawness of his emotion haemorrhage in his throat.

‘How did you find me?’ Her head pressed itself into the crook of his throat and he smelt shampoo.

‘Mutatkar said you were dead. Maggie and Joe must have lied to him.’

‘Maggie and Joe?’

Their names hung in the air and Leo knew what her response meant. ‘They’ve been holding you here.’ His arms were round her slight frame but it didn’t feel as if she had been starved.

‘Maggie and Joe.’ She repeated their names as if the words were alien to her.

‘Do you remember seeing an email Maggie composed?’

‘I remember going back to Opallios…picking up my scarf and then waking here.’

Perhaps Laura’s memory of what had been on the screen had been wiped clean by Maggie’s blow with the bottle but Leo felt the beginnings of a grim realisation. Had she been imprisoned for all this time on the basis of a single misconception? They thought she had seen the email and so could never free her because Laura would not only implicate them but lead police to the dark secret that they’d been hiding. He felt his own
hostility begin to expand inside him – pushing the pain and its sounds to the edge.

‘What email?’ He felt her body tauten.

‘Louis Allan-Carlin was a murderer. Maggie was trying to cover for him and she thought you knew.’

‘But they were the ones who offered a reward. I saw it on my TV down here.’

‘A reward they knew nobody was going to claim.’

Laura was sitting up now, stretching her limbs when Leo just wanted to hold onto her.

‘Has there never been any light in here?’ He wanted to distract her now, not overload her with a truth that she couldn’t even start to absorb.

‘They only turn off the lights when they’re bringing things into the shelter. I nearly escaped a couple of weeks ago. Think I broke someone’s fingers when I shut them in the door.’

Leo recalled the bandage on Maggie’s hand.

‘Did they hurt you?’

‘I’ve never seen them…now I understand why.’ She inhaled heavily. ‘I think they drug my food. Often I wake up and find they’ve been in.
Maggie and Joe
…’ Laura was obviously having difficulty pasting their faces onto those of her captors. ‘I thought you were one of them. The lights were turned off and somebody held me down, put a swab on my face. Somebody big.’

Leo wondered if it was the same person who had struck him on the back of his head and if it was the
man who had nearly collided with his car when he left the Allan-Carlins the last time. He’d always thought the police had been following him but it looked like Joe had had both Leo and Mutatkar monitored in case they ever got close to the truth. The watcher was obviously the man who had stolen the laptop and had been threatening Mrs Mutatkar.

‘When I woke up I knew I wasn’t alone.’

He felt her breath against his skin when she spoke and its sensation vied with all the other emotions surging through him. ‘Laura, how long have I been here?’

‘I’ve been awake for about half an hour. I don’t know how long you were here before then.’

Conversing with her seemed dreamlike and he wondered if he was about to wake at his security desk as he had so many times in the past. Then suddenly the harsh lights came on and he had to shut his eyes to the brightness.