Authors: Mark Roberts
‘OK. I’m going for the rear entrance.’
The back of the farmhouse was now washed in moonlight, reflected in the glass of the rear door and casting an ethereal sheen on the yard. It was there that Rosen saw the ambulance parked at the
back of the house, not entirely covered by the large tarpaulin draped over it.
At the back door, Rosen thought he could smell smoke. The wooden frame collapsed with one swift hit of the ram and Rosen was inside the darkened kitchen.
He shouted, ‘Bellwood! Gold! Now!’
The front door slammed from its hinges and Gold and Bellwood were in the house. A point of torchlight skittered at the front.
There was definitely smoke, but no perceptible source of fire.
Rosen saw a pinpoint of light reflected in Bellwood’s eye as she entered the kitchen. Her torch picked out and settled on a break in the regular wooden pattern of the floor. It was the
hatch into the basement.
Smoke leaked from its four sides.
Rosen dropped the ram and raised the hatch, allowing a torrent of smoke to pour out from below.
There were steep stairs leading down, wreathed in smoke.
‘Light!’ he called to Bellwood.
She threw the torch and he caught it, his senses sharpened, the pain in his legs and chest evaporating, the blood banging in his head like the primal beat of a war drum.
‘Listen for the call!’ he commanded, descending into the basement.
He had tilted his head and caught the best lungful of oxygen available to him, and held on to it, but almost lost it when his torchbeam of yellow light revealed a bloody hand mark on the bottom
of the stair.
She had tried to escape, bleeding and afraid, she had tried her best to live.
He shifted the torch to his left hand and pulled out his gun with his right.
‘Sarah? Sarah?’
She didn’t reply.
It was like being blind. Finding a wall, he kept his back to it, negotiating the room by the touch of his shoulder. He moved swiftly but played the light carefully over the smoke.
He picked out a shape, a coffin, he thought at first glance, but it wasn’t a coffin. It was too wide.
‘Sarah?’
She’s dead
, he thought.
Rosen turned ninety degrees, his shoulder still against the wall, and kept moving round the first corner.
‘Sarah?’
She is gone. I have nothing; therefore I have nothing to lose.
There was a half-door in the wall. He opened it and shone his light into the darkness. It was a tunnel leading upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. The grain chute.
The smoke stung his eyes and filled his lungs but he moved with increasing speed, racing around the perimeter of the room, and came to a door frame.
He shone his light into the middle room.
A machine of sorts.
His torchlight stroked the letters on the hoist.
Faboorgliften
. He had no idea what it was, other than that here it had been used as an instrument of torture.
A table and the fierce source of the heat. It looked like a huge barbecue. The flames around it licked and spat.
The cloth on the table was burning.
Rosen held his torch between his teeth, grabbed the smouldering velvet and pulled it down onto the ground, covering the fire and burning his left hand as he did so. The cry of pain stuck in his
throat while the flames on the ground did battle with the suffocating velvet.
He backed away from the fire, glancing over his shoulder into the smoke, and dragged his light along the wall to the doorway of the third room. There was nowhere else she could be. When he
whispered, ‘Sarah?’, he could feel the proximity of another human being. He sensed her presence, in a recognition that had been years in the making.
He trained the light down. Sarah was on the ground. Her face was unblemished, her body soaked in blood.
‘David!’ Bellwood’s voice, mute and muffled, filtered through the ceiling above him. ‘David! He’s in there! He’s just torched the stairs!’
Sarah’s body seemed to be lying on a red blanket. Rosen kneeled down next to her to find it wasn’t a blanket. It was her blood soaking her clothes. He shone the light in her face.
Putting the torch down, he picked up her wrist to feel for a pulse.
But there was none. Then, he detected the faintest sign of one but wondered if he was imagining it.
In the dim light, he saw the desecration of her body.
He had never seen so many separate wounds on one person.
In that tortured moment, he sensed that they were not alone. A foot banged on the floor above and Gold shouted, ‘David! David! Call my name!’ His feeling was confirmed by a single
exhalation behind him. Rosen looked over his shoulder but the smoke was too thick for him to see.
Sarah didn’t appear to be breathing. He angled her head, held her nose and, breathing into her mouth, laid the heel of his hand in the centre of her chest. He started to pump at her heart,
hearing an unpremeditated howl rise from the centre of his being.
Her flesh was torn, and her blood seeped through his fingers as he gave cardiac massage.
In the distance, he became aware of Bellwood’s voice, and of Gold calling to him, but they were far, far away, shouting about fire and calling the name
David
, but he didn’t
connect it with himself. It was a call to some other person in some other place.
He slid his hand under her head to reposition it. Her face appeared clearer through the murk and, with his fingers in the dampness of her hair, he wondered how it was that after such an ordeal
she could look so young. He’d left her alone that morning, and as night gathered around him, he was just too late.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Desolation overwhelmed him and for a moment his mind went blank, his concentration crumbling. Time and place vanished. There was just smoke and desolation. And then a little sound right behind
him.
The sound, a footstep, brought him back. Under cover of the smoke, something was creeping up on him.
Rosen turned and stood up in the same instant.
The face seemed suspended in white smoke, a disembodied head hovering, observing Rosen as if he was a specimen in a jar.
It was the little boy in the locket, worn by time, the unspeaking face beneath the black slick of hair.
He stood impassively, holding a metal spoke. It pointed upwards, as if in accusation. He remained still and silent in the swirling smoke, blood leaking from two facial wounds.
And then he spoke, but the word was slurred and inarticulate.
‘Canathus!’
‘Capaneus? There’s no such person as Capaneus, Dwyer.’
Paul Dwyer’s face was ordinary, not that of a monster at all. But in a moment, as Rosen watched, the features of every mean, loveless, violent, grasping, lustful, self-pitying, despicable
criminal he’d ever clapped eyes on manifested themselves in Dwyer’s. Every thug, every child-warping paedophile, every family-destroying arsonist, every self-obsessed killer, appeared
as if as one in the smoke-filled basement of a farmhouse in East Sussex.
As Rosen aimed his gun at Dwyer, he felt the sudden blast of a burning chemical in his face, flammable spirit that ate into his eyes as soon as it touched them. He slipped backwards in
Sarah’s blood but stayed on his feet. His gun fell from his hands as his fingers flew to his eyes. In the adjoining room, charcoal still crackled and sighed under the cover he’d thrown
over the fire. Apart from this there was silence, a huge and ugly silence, broken only by a cry of agony that came from deep inside Rosen.
He swayed on his feet but remained upright, listening for the sound of Paul Dwyer moving.
Rosen rubbed his eyes, trying to soak up the chemical with his sleeves. The pungent smell became overwhelming as Dwyer threw more and more lighter fuel into Rosen’s face.
It dripped down onto his clothes. Rosen had a vision of himself burning, a huge human torch alongside his wife’s bleeding corpse.
He heard a rasp, then another as Dwyer struggled with a box of matches.
Rosen summoned up all the strength he possessed. He had one last weapon left.
‘Flint’s a liar, he’s lied to you all along, he’s made a fool out of you. You’ve been duped by a showman, Paul. Do you hear me? You’re an idiot, a
mummy’s boy, and this time tomorrow the whole world’s going to know.’ He summoned up the will to laugh and barked that laughter into Dwyer’s face. ‘You’re not
some Satanic superman, you’re a fucking mummy’s boy! And you’ve been had by a third-rate priest.’
His eyes burned afresh from the fumes and he held his breath to resist a howl of pain. Dwyer clamped a hand over Rosen’s mouth and he tasted blood on the killer’s fingers. Raw
courage held him together, courage from knowing that somehow Sarah had wounded her murderer.
Dwyer’s hand pressed down on Rosen’s mouth. He yanked his head away.
‘You won’t silence me like that, Dwyer!’
Rosen threw out an arm and caught hold of a handful of cotton. He pulled hard and could feel that he was dragging Dwyer towards him by the shirt-front, held in the grip of his fist. Hanging on
tightly, he said, ‘Do you want to know the truth, Paul, the whole truth about your Satanic revolution?’
‘Canathus—’
‘Capaneus? A for Alessio, the buckled A for Alpha, where you left the bodies; all that secret knowledge, that hidden dangerous knowledge? It’s a crock of shit, Paul. Sorry to break
the bad news to you, but the Capaneus scam’s got about as much truth in it as the shit Pastor Jim used to peddle to your mother back in the Church of the Living Light. He’s been taking
the piss out of you, just like Pastor Jim used to do to your mother. There’s no such person as Alessio Capaneus – it’s a fiction, and you fell for it! Like mother, like son. What
a pair of saps.’
Dwyer tore himself away from Rosen’s grip and Rosen heard the sound of a box of matches emptying out onto the concrete floor. He lashed out with his foot, listening for any sound from
Dwyer, aiming for his head but kicking thin air.
He heard a single match being struck on the rough ground. And Dwyer’s breath was in his face. A small flame sizzled in the corrupted air.
‘You’re flammable too, Dwyer,’ said Rosen. ‘I made sure of that when I held you close. Go on, torch me. I burn, you burn!’
A gunshot. The enclosed space resounded with the solitary clap of a gun. Rosen felt the air rattle close to his skull and then became aware that Paul Dwyer’s body had slumped and fallen
away from him, collapsing to the floor. The match expired as Dwyer fell. And, for a moment, it was as if all the sounds in the world belonged in separate compartments, not in the living fabric of
the air. The ring of the gunshot was deadened in the flat acoustics of the basement. The thud of Dwyer’s fallen body.
‘David?’ Bellwood’s voice. She was moving closer, steadily, but as fast as she could. ‘I’m taking you by the hand now, David.’
He felt Bellwood’s hand as assertive fingers tugged his hands away from his face.
‘Don’t rub your eyes, David.’
‘She’s dead,’ said Rosen.
‘I’m inspecting the body of Paul Dwyer. I’m shining my torch onto his face and head. Gunshot at close range, wound to the frontal lobes of his head.’
‘You shot him, Carol.’
‘No. You did,’ she replied. ‘I was just outside the range of vision, behind the smoke, when I heard the gunshot. You shot him, David.’
‘I didn’t shoot him,’ said Rosen. ‘I dropped my gun when the little shit threw lighter fuel in my eyes.’
‘Quick!’ said Bellwood. ‘Gold, get some water down here! Don’t touch your eyes, David! Sarah? Sarah Rosen?’
And he wondered why Bellwood was talking to his dead wife.
Bellwood let go of Rosen’s hand and crouched down. Rosen followed her voice.
‘Sarah?’ Bellwood’s voice sounded like a plea for mercy. ‘An ambulance, Gold, we need the ambulance.’
‘How did you get in?’ asked Rosen
‘I came in through the grain chute. I crawled down. He set the basement stairs on fire, blocked off the entrance you came down.’
Three taps on the floor, soft sounds.
Bellwood whispered, ‘Kneel down where you are, David.’
‘David,’ said Sarah. He turned his head at the sound of his wife’s voice.
‘Sarah?’ His voice reached out to her.
He kneeled down and fumbled around in the dark, placing his hand gently on his wife’s arm. The gun slid from her grasp. As he touched her hand, she let out an exhausted cry of pain as the
fuel on his fingers entered an open wound on her flesh.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘David. The baby?’ The fading echo of a lost whisper.
He couldn’t speak to answer.
‘I killed . . .’ said Sarah. ‘David, I heard you. I saw the gun . . . on the ground. I shot him . . . in . . . the head.’
T
wo hours later, Rosen sat at his wife’s hospital bedside, dabbing his stinging eyes with a cold damp tissue, his blurred vision slowly
returning. Under sedation, she slept peacefully. He folded his hand over hers as it lay, scratched and torn, on top of the blanket.
He considered what she’d suffered in the basement and wished he had a god to pray to for Sarah and their baby.
In the dim glow of an anglepoise lamp, she looked peaceful, except for a crease that formed slowly on her brow. He held her hand tightly, hoping that whatever she was dreaming at that moment
would dissolve into something sweet and gentle.
The crease vanished as slowly as it had appeared.
Her breathing slowed a little.
Tenderly, he rested his cheek against her womb and whispered, ‘Without you, I am nothing, I am no one.’
He bent over her and kissed her brow.
As he sat in the chair at her bedside, with the whole of his being he willed her and their baby to pull through.
——
A
S DAWN APPROACHED
, there was a gentle tap on the door of Sarah’s room. Through the glass, Rosen saw Bellwood waiting, but not looking directly
into the room.
Reluctantly, he left his wife and joined Bellwood outside.
She glanced around. There was no one about.