A Dark Place to Die (37 page)

Something is bothering him. Something he's seen that stubbornly refuses to rise to the surface.

He sits for some time as the light fades around him. He goes inside and calls Zoe and Mel's mobiles again with the same frustrating result. He calls Mel's home number and leaves another message on her answerphone, his voice now getting an edge to it. Teaching him a lesson is one thing. This is beginning to verge on cruelty.

Koop looks at his watch: 7.10 pm. His bed, their bed, is calling him but it's too early. Past experience has taught him that bed now will result in a sandy-eyed wake-up around two or three in the morning and a lousy day tomorrow. He wants to be as fresh as possible for Zoe's return.

He heats some beans and eats them standing up watching the kitchen TV.

Back on the couch he flicks through the stack of art books on the coffee table. It's one of Zoe's vices to buy more thick, glossy art books than any sane person could reasonably need. Koop can see that there's a point to this stack. All of them feature the British artists that Zoe's GOMA presentation is built around.

He turns the glossy pages. Tracy Emin. The infamous 'Myra' image by Marcus Harvey. Damien Hirst's incredible shark.

Zoe has Post-it notes in a number of places which show the shark image and Koop remembers she's used it as the centrepiece of their presentation to GOMA. He continues browsing and is brought up short at the photographs of the Gormley installation in Liverpool.

He closes the book quickly and walks out onto the decking, his breathing a little laboured. He sits in a chair and closes his eyes. The image of Stevie leaps unbidden into his mind as he knew it would. Not a live Stevie. Instead, Koop sees the brittle, charred thing that Stevie had become.

He opens his eyes. This is ridiculous. Bugger how early it is. He'll take a sleeping pill and crash out until the morning. As he turns back towards the house his eye catches a flicker of green light at the end of the deck and he remembers in an instant what it is that's been nagging away at him.

The hot tub.

In the dark of the evening a thin cast of green light has appeared along one edge of the hot tub cover that wasn't visible in the daylight.

Koop approaches the tub, his guts churning. He hasn't looked there, and neither, he suspects, has Sullivan.

Koop snaps the catches off the lid and lifts it.

Time stands still.

Mel lies in the green-lit water, face down, her pale skin beyond white, her long black hair spread out like an ink blot. Koop's hand flies to his mouth.

She's been sliced in two.

66

Eckhardt arrives back at the office from Menno Koopman's place around 3 pm. He sinks down gratefully behind his desk and pretends to do some work. In all honesty he just wants to go home and smoke and drink and then sleep.

He clicks his computer on, checks his email and forgets about sleeping.

There, in the middle of a long pile of junk and the usual internal crap, Eckhardt spots the phrase 'received by Jimmy Gelagotis'. He'd almost binned it along with the rest.

He opens Ella's email and sees the attachment. There are departmental protocols about opening unsolicited email attachments but Warren doesn't hesitate. Two minutes later he sits back and rubs his face. Just like Jimmy and Ella, the 'Stevie Wonder' clip has rendered him momentarily speechless.

That the footage is genuine he has no doubt whatsoever.

After a couple of minutes he shakes himself into action and logs it in the evidence chain.

Then he emails it to Chris Chakos and Frank Keane with an explanatory message.

He picks up the phone and calls Liverpool.

It takes Eckhardt twenty minutes to track Frank Keane down. MIT won't give out his mobile so Eckhardt has to wait until the man calls him back.

'This better be worth it,' says Keane. Eckhardt can hear the clink of bottles in the background. He looks at his watch. It's almost 3 am in Liverpool.

'You need to get to a computer,' says Eckhardt. 'I sent you a file.' He explains what's happened. 'It's nasty, Frank, but I thought you'd want to know about it right away.'

Even from twelve thousand miles away, Eckhardt can hear the excitement in Keane's voice. 'Thanks, Warren. I'll call you about this.'

Ten minutes later, Keane has sobered up faster than he's ever done in his life. He is alone in the darkened MIT office, the clip frozen on his desktop on the last frame.

'Fuck.'

Like his Australian counterpart, Keane sits motionless for a few moments. He watches the mpeg five or six times without gleaning any new information. Whoever shot the footage took care not to reveal anything that might help identify the killer or killers. It was put together as a warning to Jimmy Gelagotis. A warning he didn't heed.

Then Keane starts thinking as best he can, his alcohol haze both helping and hindering.

They like to film it.

Film has come into this before.

The Matty Halligan thing.

Gittings told him about Matty Halligan and Keane tracked down the Vice officer who got the videos from the S&M bust. Those tapes are now part of the evidence.

Keane goes downstairs, through the silent MIT offices and checks out the box of DVDs. He hauls them back upstairs. He doesn't know what he's looking for but the 'Stevie Wonder' clip has brought them into his mind.

The first he looks at is the one Gittings mentioned. Matty Halligan strapped naked across some complicated piece of sexual apparatus. There are at least two other men in the room. One of them – dressed from head to toe in black leather, his face entirely hooded – is fucking Halligan. The other man only comes into shot now and again. He too is dressed in leather. There is nothing Keane can use.

He turns off the DVD and inserts another. He's a few minutes into that one when something clicks.

He ejects the second DVD, goes back to the first and there it is. The man fucking Halligan is holding his head down from behind, his fingers splayed through Halligan's cropped hair.

Keane freezes the image and bends close to the screen. He uses the zoom feature to close in on a small section of the image.

'Fuck me,' he whispers. Sobered up or not, the room seems to tilt and Keane has to steady himself.

It can't be.

The hooded man's hand is clear against Halligan's dark hair.

Missing the tips of two of his fingers.

'Perch,' breathes Keane.

67

Zoe can't see a thing. She has a hood over her head and a ball jammed in her mouth which is cinched in place using a leather strap.

Zoe knows what it is: a gimp mask, an S&M sex toy. She feels her gorge rising and she wills herself not to vomit. With this thing on she'd choke to death.

She is nude and has been bound by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Mel was skilled at knots too and Zoe, from time to time, allowed herself to be tied up, enjoying the frisson of vulnerability as Mel teased her.

That was nothing like this.

Her arms have been pulled behind her painfully and roped to her ankles, arching her back and forming her into a rigid bow shape. She's been wedged tightly into some sort of container; one she only just fits into. The madman has grazed her thigh forcing her into it. The container is cold to the touch, metallic, and is inside a vehicle moving at high speed.

Thankfully the road is smooth. For the first half hour or so Zoe was bounced around violently, banging her head against the roof of her container twice. Then came a
smooth section before a long uncomfortable passage where Zoe deduced they were on a dirt road. It is agony.

And all of this is nothing after what happened to Mel.

Oh God, Mel.

In the dark, Zoe sobs.

Behind the wheel of the truck, Declan North is outwardly calm.

He drives steadily south through the night, the road unwinding before him in a narrow cone of light, as anonymous as any tradesman going about his business. He keeps to the speed limit and signals when required. He pulls over twice. The first time to take a piss, the second to go through his rituals. It's difficult out there under the great bowl of Australian nothingness, but North improvises by raising the rear gate on the ute and calibrating the angles while kneeling on the dirt.

No-one passes him.

He and the bitch are six hours from her home in the middle of nowhere. North has never been anywhere that is as nowhere as this place.

At 4 am, North pulls off the road and drives two or three kilometres slowly into the scrubby bush, taking care not to get stuck in any unseen ruts. He finds a fold in the land which he's confident makes a perfect hiding spot and parks the truck.

In the back of the ute he's kept things simple. His supplies take up most of the rear of the four-seat cab along with a lock-box containing the cocaine. The other, larger lock-box with the bitch inside is bolted along one side of the tray of the ute. North has placed a foam mattress down the other side. He'll sleep there tonight.

North climbs into the back of the truck and unfastens the lock-box. Zoe tries not to tremble.

It's the hardest thing she's ever had to do.

North doesn't say a word. He leans in and begins to lift her out of the box. She instinctively resists and North slaps her hard across the face. After that she does as he directs.

He takes off her hood and Zoe blinks. Even the lights coming from the truck interior seem harsh. North's face is blank. From what she can see he's calm. He unties her legs and fastens a rope around her neck. For a terrifying moment Zoe is sure he's going to hang her, or worse, drag her behind the truck.

'Walk,' he says and it dawns on her: he's exercising her, like a dog. After almost twelve hours in the lock-box she can hardly move. In fact, at first, she can't move. Her legs won't work and she drops painfully to the dirt. North prods her with the toe of his boot.

'Walk.'

Zoe, fighting the urge to cry, struggles onto all fours and tries to stand. Gradually her circulation begins to return and she's able to hobble painfully around at the end of the rope, conscious of North's eyes on her.

Walk. She wills herself to do it. Walk. Endure. Survive.

He allows her to stray about ten metres before he ties the end of the rope to the towbar on the truck. North loosens the gimp mask and takes out the ball. The pain in her jaw is excruciating and Zoe can't tell if her mouth is open or closed. She thinks about screaming but is unsure she could, even if she wanted to.

As if reading her thoughts, North speaks. 'Go ahead. Give it a whirl. Why not?'

When she doesn't reply, he throws his head back and howls like a wolf. He stops and looks up at the empty night. 'See?'

He holds a litre bottle of water to her lips and Zoe drinks greedily, her world now reduced to the basics. After a few seconds North lifts the bottle and empties it over her head.

'What?' says Zoe.

'You smell.' North's voice is non-judgemental. It's as if he's said 'you're tall', or 'you're English'. Somehow it frightens Zoe more than anything since leaving Nashua.

'You need to piss, go now,' he says.

Absurdly, after all that's happened, Zoe feels the need for privacy. North watches her, his eyes revealing nothing. She squats behind the front end of the truck and urinates into the red dirt. With her hands behind her, and the pain in her limbs, it's difficult but she manages.

North takes a second bottle of water and pours it over her. She stands dumbly while he washes her clean under the stars. With a cloth he washes her armpits and her pussy, his eyes on hers. She forces herself to remain expressionless.

Endure. Survive.

Eventually he's finished. North removes his clothes and Zoe braces herself for what is to come. He pulls off his boots, folds his jeans and shirt neatly and puts them in the rear of the cab. He slips on a pair of thongs.

Zoe wanders as far as the rope will let her. Out to where the light is at its dimmest, where she can feel at least a shred of privacy for a few moments more.

Naked, North uses another litre of water to wash himself thoroughly. Zoe sees the pale lines striping his upper body and looks away. When he's finished, North throws the
bottle into the bush and hops up onto the mattress. He lies down and draws a blanket around himself.

'Get in,' he says to Zoe.

She says nothing and remains at the end of the rope.

'Suit yourself,' says North, Zoe registering his Belfast accent properly for the first time. He didn't speak much last night when he did . . . that thing to Mel. Now she can hear it clearly.

'You'll get in soon enough. It's too cold for you to stay out there all fecking night.'

Zoe remains silent but the madman is right. The water on her naked skin is adding to the cold as it dries. After a few minutes Zoe draws closer to the end of the truck.

'And if you're thinking about getting that rope untied then you can forget about that too,' says North. 'The knots are too good.'

Zoe knows this is true. The rope hasn't budged a millimetre since she's been tied up.

With difficulty she steps into the back of the cab and lies down next to her attacker, Mel's killer. Her skin recoils from the places it touches his. It's like getting into bed with a lizard.

'You know we might have seen each other back in Liverpool?'

'What?' Zoe can't work out what the freak means. Liverpool?

'Hope Street,' says North. 'We were at the same college. Eighty-three. I googled you.' His accent seems stronger now she's tuned in. Eighty-
t
ree.

Is he for real?

'Is this what this is about? You're a stalker?' It's the first thing that comes into her head.

'Feck, no!' North laughs. 'Just weird, though, hey?'

'I was there,' says Zoe. 'We didn't meet.' Thinking: keep him talking. 'What did . . . what subject did you do?'

North squeezes Zoe's breast. There's a playful tone to his voice that is more sickening than anything she's heard yet. 'Are you trying to keep me talking? Who gives a fuck what subject I did? That was then and this is now and that's all there is to it.'