Long Time Lost (25 page)

Darren’s shins were bound with duct tape and the metal chain had been coiled around them, stretching up to be wrapped once around the horizontal pole Miller was leaning against, then tied off multiple times on an upright pole several metres back that was clustered with knots and tangled with drooping chain loops.

Miller couldn’t reach Darren. The length of chain was too long, the distance down to him too far. He leaned out further over the abyss, stretching his arm and shouting Darren’s name, the horizontal pole digging into his gut. He thought of trying to hoist Darren up but he doubted he could do it. Darren was thirteen, maybe fourteen stone. Factor in the way Miller’s hand was shredded and the strong possibility that Wade was close by, and he decided on a different approach.

He hurried down a trio of ladders to a lower deck. The tarpaulin masked his view but he could see an indent where Darren’s body was pressing against the material. Folding out the blade on his penknife, he pierced the canvas and began carving a long, ragged slit to Darren’s right. Which was easier said than done because the blade wasn’t particularly sharp and the tarpaulin was damp. Miller pulled the blade out and stabbed a line of holes, ripping at the material in between with his hands. Then he switched to a saw-toothed attachment on the penknife and worked it to and fro until the gap was big enough to force his head and shoulders through.

Darren was facing away from him, wriggling against his restraints, his movements fast and desperate.

Miller stuffed his knife into his back pocket and reached for Darren’s knees, triggering a muffled howl and some furious bucking, then spun him towards him, grabbing him by the belt and raising him up until he could look in his inverted face.

His eyes were bloodshot, his nose was broken and he was bleeding from an ugly cut on his temple. Two strips of duct tape covered his mouth in an X shape and his cheeks bulged as he tried to shout.

‘I’m going to get you out of here.’ Miller hauled him closer, trying to ignore the mighty drop to the peaked church roof below.

But Darren kept moaning, kept nodding his head.

‘I’m going to pull you through. Stop fighting. Stay still. Hey!’ Miller reached out with his free hand and balled Darren’s sweater in his fist, glaring into his fear-blown eyes. ‘Work with me.’

For just a moment, he relaxed. The muscles in his face slackened off. His pupils seemed to clear.

But just as rapidly, a new stimulus altered his response.

The fear returned. It spiked. Darren moaned and flailed, jerking his head. Miller barely had time to process the warning before he felt one hand thump against his back and another dig into his hair.

There was no real pause and certainly no reprieve, and before he could defend himself or even turn, he was pitched forwards and thrust out.

He fell hard and heavy, flipping right over, his legs cartwheeling around, the light-streaked cityscape rotating with him.

His wrists flexed and extended, fingers digging in to Darren’s belt and sweatshirt. Then his weight bore down and he tightened every muscle and tendon, wrists smarting, fingers loosening as he slammed against Darren’s upturned body, his knee crunching off his jaw.

He clung on and looked up. Above him was only wind and whirling darkness and the fluttering tear in the tarpaulin until, many fearful seconds later, he heard a whoop and saw Wade lean his upper body out over the top deck of the scaffolding, his big, square head slashed by a frenzied grin.

Wade ducked out of sight again and Miller eyed the split he’d carved in the tarpaulin, asking himself if he could climb up to it, when there was a sudden clunk and a slackening of the chain and the two men plummeted a fast and terrifying ten metres.

The chain tightened off, almost jerking Miller loose. The metal was so taut it seemed to hum. The links cut in to Darren’s shins and he screamed from behind his gag, wriggling in an attempt to get Miller off him.

But Miller wouldn’t let go. He couldn’t.

He looked down and around, searching for a way out, but Darren’s writhing was becoming wilder and more unpredictable, the chain spinning and swinging. He stuck out a leg, failing to hook a foot around a pole behind the canvas. Wade was shouting at him, taunting him, and Miller looked up into his flat, wide-apart eyes, his gaze almost bovine, blissed out, amused, only to see him clench the chain and begin to shake it some more.

Miller loosened his grip on Darren’s sweater and grabbed for the bunched chains between his legs, then above his ankles. Darren screamed harder. Miller gritted his teeth and freed his other hand from Darren’s belt and planted one foot on his chest as he leapt up, the metal links carving into the cuts on his hand through the padding around his palm.

His grip failed on the rain-greased links and he slipped, but reached up and kept scrambling, kept climbing, heaving his upper body clear of Darren until only their feet were entangled below.

Wade tipped his head to one side. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

He jolted the chain.

Miller clung on, the wind and rain whipping against him.

‘This won’t hold much longer,’ Wade shouted. ‘Or maybe your strength will fail first.’

Miller pressed his face against the fragile metal, intensely aware of the tension running through it, of the thin air that surrounded him, of his own lumpen weight and the give in his arms and the gaping hole in the canvas high above.

‘You want Anna,’ he shouted back. ‘You need Anna.’

‘Not me.’

‘Lane does.’

‘Mr Lane isn’t here. And I’d like to see what kind of a mess you make when you hit that church roof.’

Wade jangled the chain. Darren whined forlornly through his busted nose and taped mouth.

‘What do you think Lane’s going to do to you if I fall?’ Miller shouted. ‘How will you find Anna then? I have a team behind me. They’ll carry this on.’

Wade stilled for just a second. Maybe he really did think about it. And a second was all it took.

Miller lowered a hand and plucked his knife from his back pocket, opening a blade with his teeth, springing off the chain, holding on with his feet and ankles as he stabbed the blade into the tarpaulin. It popped the canvas, slipped, tipped back, the knife beginning to loosen just as Miller forced his free arm through the frayed gap up to the elbow and grasped for the pole behind.

He stabbed at the canvas again and again, punching furiously, then forced his head through, and afterwards his shoulder and his other arm, clutching the pole in both hands, heaving with the last of his strength, his hips snagging, the tarpaulin puckering round him, dropping on to a dusty scaffold deck.

His arms were numbed and aching, his fingers so stiff with muscle strain that they’d curled into claws. He levered himself on to an elbow, his entire body seeming to buzz and convulse.

Then he heard the fast shuffle-zip of the metal chain unravelling and he whipped his head round to see Darren drop once more.

Julia Summerhayes unlocked the rear door to Manchester Town Hall, took a detailed look at Lloyd’s warrant card, then led her through the dark and echoing building to an office in a far corner of the fourth floor.

The coroner was dressed stylishly in a black pencil skirt and a beige silk blouse. Sliding into her office chair, she swept aside a half-eaten packet of crisps and an open drinks can that bore all the hallmarks of a vending-machine dinner, and invited Lloyd to take a seat across from her.

‘It’s good of you to see me so late.’

Lloyd felt suddenly nervous and out of her depth, though she wasn’t sure why exactly. Perhaps it was because she didn’t know quite what she was looking for or hoping to hear, whereas the coroner had an air of professional certainty about her. Then again, she was the only one who knew what she was about to say.

‘Oh, I had paperwork to catch up on anyway. And now,’ she added, ducking for something on the floor by her feet, ‘it seems I have even more.’

She lifted two box files and placed them carefully on her desk with their spines pointed towards Lloyd. The name Sarah Adams was written on one of the files, together with the date of her death and what Lloyd took to be the number of her case file. Lloyd could see the same information about Melanie on the second file.

‘You said there was something you wanted to show me?’

‘“Want” is a strong word.’ The coroner tapped a nail against the file on the left. ‘These are Sarah’s records.’

She pushed the file across the desk and Lloyd reached for it. The box was heavy. A stack of papers slid around inside.

The coroner said, ‘On a quick inspection, the records for Sarah are full and complete. My assistant checked, and according to our system, nobody has requested access to them.’

‘That sounds like something you could have told me over the phone.’

‘And I would have done, if it weren’t for this.’

Now she slid over Melanie’s file. Lloyd weighed it in her free hand. It was much lighter.

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Frankly, neither do I. The death certificate is in there, signed by my predecessor. There’s also a top sheet confirming that a forensic autopsy was carried out by one of our senior pathologists who retired only a few months ago. He has a place somewhere in France, I believe.’

Lloyd flipped open the box and leafed through the few sheets of paperwork the coroner had referred to. The autopsy form was signed and dated by the pathologist. Stapled to it was a summary page that confirmed Melanie’s gender and listed brief details of her weight, height, eye colour, hair colour and ethnicity, with an additional note about the extensive burns to her body. After that came the formal death certificate, then the cardboard base of the file.

‘What else should there be?’

‘Notes and photographs. Transcripts of the recording the pathologist made during the autopsy. Various forms my predecessor would have signed off on.’

‘So where is it all?’

‘I have no idea. I checked Sarah’s file, on the off chance that somehow the papers got bundled together. That’s not the case.’

‘Could they have been misfiled somewhere else?’

‘That’s a possibility.’

‘How about electronic records?’

‘I had my assistant take a look. There’s nothing on the system.’

Lloyd was silent for a moment, listening to the gathering quiet of the building all around them. She could feel an icy cool at the base of her neck. A clenching in her gut.

‘My assistant is going to investigate this further in the morning,’ the coroner told her. ‘He’ll be able to get help from our IT department. It
could
be a simple glitch in our computer systems.’

‘You wouldn’t have called me here if you believed that was true. What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘You asked me if anyone had requested access to the files. We keep details of all requests in a separate database. It seems that somebody did apply, but only for Melanie’s records. The request was logged shortly after we released the body for cremation.’

‘Who made the application?’

‘A Fiona Grainger. The note on our system lists her as Melanie’s aunt.’

Darren fell fast – much further this time – then the chain tightened off again, wrenching him to a halt. Miller heard moaning from below and cursing from above. Clutching his knife, he pushed to his feet and teetered towards a ladder, stumbling in his haste, grasping for the rungs, climbing to the top deck, where he swayed drunkenly for a moment, fixing on Wade, then lowered his head in a charge.

Wade had his back to him. He was busy fighting with the last loops of chain that had been tied off around the upright pole. The chain was stretched taut across the deck and the upright was creaking. The metal was under a lot of strain.

So was Wade’s body. He had part of the chain under his armpit and he was leaning all his weight on it, trying to work enough slack to slip his fingers beneath the tangled links so he could free the final knots. He kept fumbling even as he turned his head and saw Miller advancing on him with the knife in his hand. He smiled stupidly, perhaps believing another second or two was all it would take to undo the tangle.

But the chain was too taut, Darren was too heavy, and Miller was faster and angrier than he’d anticipated.

He slammed into Wade, grappling with his arms, driving with his shoulder, forcing Wade back so hard and so fast that his temple smacked off the upright scaffold.

The impact made a dull, hollow noise, like a golf club swung at a fridge door.

An average man would have collapsed and lost consciousness. But Wade just grunted through his teeth, eyes dimming for the briefest instant. Then he blinked and swung a massive arm at Miller, clubbing him behind the ear.

A fast follow-up blow slammed into Miller’s stomach – a closed fist, driven high, that forced the air from his lungs. He jackknifed on instinct, just as Wade lifted his squat thigh in the air and drove his knee into Miller’s face.

Wade was probably hoping for the nose or the jaw but he clipped Miller’s eye socket. Miller stumbled back, pressing his bandaged palm to his face, and Wade took the opportunity to grab his free arm and slam his wrist down against a scaffold pole until he dropped the knife in his hand.

The knife tumbled away, but Wade wasn’t done with his arm just yet. He pulled and twisted it, turning Miller round, contorting his wrist until he slumped to his knees, at which point Wade grabbed a fistful of his hair and forced Miller’s throat down against the chain that was stretched crossways in front of him.

He was going to break Miller’s arm or choke him out, whichever came first.

Throat bulging, his pulse thumping in his ears, Miller fumbled with his trouser cuff, digging his fingers beneath the hem of his sock. He ripped free a syringe that he’d taken from the veterinary surgery, trailing the swatch of sterile tape he’d used to secure it in place, then flicked the plastic cover off the needle point with his thumb and stabbed down to his side, plunging the sharpened point through the toe of Wade’s training shoe, striking bone.

Wade yelled and let go, withdrawing his foot, and Miller felt the syringe snap as he freed his throat from the chain, unravelled his wrist and probed at his neck. He squinted through tears and saw that the needle of the syringe had sheared off close to the top. And now Wade was lurching towards him, the rest of the needle sticking out through his shoe, embedded in his toe.

He looked furious, and for the first time in Miller’s life he experienced something he’d never truly known before. He’d always been bigger than most thugs he encountered. He’d always been stronger and smarter. But he was beaten here and he knew it. Wade was shorter, he was slighter, but he was ruthless. A killing machine, pure and simple.

He leapt forwards, springing off his good foot, diving with his arms extended and his fingers hooked into claws. He clutched at Miller’s ears and slammed his head back against the tensioned chain. Slammed it again and again, harder and harder, the links stabbing into his skull, every impact shaking loose a little more of Miller’s resolve.

He didn’t have long. A few seconds only. He waited for Wade to yank his head forwards once more and then he thrust his left arm up, aiming for Wade’s mouth. But he didn’t punch him. Didn’t strike him at all. Wade’s jaw was parted, his teeth bared in a wild-eyed, nostril-flared snarl, and Miller slipped his fingers in, then his balled hand.

Wade’s teeth gnashed against the wadded material protecting Miller’s flesh. He shook his head, trying to shake Miller loose. But Miller was already lifting the syringe in his right hand, already lining the shattered point of the needle up with the opening in Wade’s mouth.

He squeezed the plunger and a jet of murky yellow liquid spurted out, wetting his fingers, pooling on Wade’s tongue.

Wade gagged and reared back. He spat and retched.

But it wouldn’t help. Miller had been very careful to take his time and select the most potent drug he could find in the medical lockers at the veterinary surgery. He’d called Hanson on his mobile, asking him to google the meds on offer.

The vial he’d settled on contained a combination of Domitor and Torbugesic that resulted in a powerful horse tranquiliser. The drug didn’t need to be fully ingested. It just needed to spend a second or two in the mouth to be absorbed through the tongue or the cheeks.

And it was clearly working, because Wade was swaying and clawing at his throat, croaking hoarsely. He dropped to his knees and his lightless grey eyes blinked once, twice, then roved wildly around. His face sagged, his muscles slackened and he slumped down on to his side.