No One Gets Out Alive (43 page)

Amber sniffed. ‘I’m ready. Ready for that prick. I almost want him to show up. You know, that’s the crazy thing. Part of me is even excited by the idea of finishing this thing.
Of finishing him.’

She had come down from fear to light up with rage. Even her hands trembled. It felt good too, if good was the right word. It felt natural and necessary and vital and unstoppable; she
couldn’t prevent this kind of rage even if she chose to.
They
had gifted the rage to her the night they locked her in the ground floor flat. Where
she
had been.

In the background, beyond the border of her thoughts that were lit up red, and that made her teeth grind until they felt like they were made of clay and oozing together, she could hear
Josh’s voice. A stern voice that was gradually rising in volume: ‘OK, Amber. Amber! Listen to me. Amber, now I need you to calm down. To think this through. Amber, are you listening to
me?’

But she wasn’t heeding him. This was her home, her sanctuary; she had suffered for this and she had earned this and she had paid for it with more than money. And that rat-faced prick was
not coming back to frighten and threaten her.

To break her.

‘I will not let him! I will not! Where is he? Josh! Where the fuck is he?’ And she only realized she was screaming a few seconds after she’d begun. ‘Three years! Three
years and he’s still out there. He’s got her. Her! Why can’t you find them? Why? Why, Josh? Because he took
her
from the house. That’s why. They never found
her
. . .’ And then, to the shocked silence at the other end of the phone, she whispered, ‘
She
hid him. Hid him, Josh. That’s the only way Fergal got away.
She
knows how to hide.
She
hid in that building for a hundred years. Why will none of you believe me?’

Josh stayed quiet. Not even he knew what to say. He’d been in Iraq and Afghanistan; he’d been in wars and Amber believed he had killed men. He was now a bodyguard for the wealthy and
their children because Josh knew how to spot danger and anything that might seem suspicious or risky; he was a risk manager. He knew how to hide and he knew how to hide people from their enemies.
But not even a man like Josh was in
her
league.

Her.

Maggie.

Black Maggie.

The words thumped deep and low, rhythmically, like a little drum in a wooden box, beaten by unseen hands in a black room that opened doors onto another place you could not see the end of.

‘In about an hour I’ll pull over and check in.’ Josh was doing his best to remain calm and professional after she had screamed at him and practically accused him of failing
her. ‘Then I’ll call you as I am approaching the house. It’ll be late. But do your best to stay calm until I get there.’

Amber sniffed. ‘Is there any news? Anything that you can tell me?’

‘Sorry. No.’ And she knew that as he said this, Josh was also struggling to comprehend how a sub-literate career criminal, well over six foot tall, with limited resources, with
filthy clothes and hands covered in blood, with no known friends in the West Midlands, with half his face burned away by concentrated sulphuric acid, could have stayed hidden for three years and
left no trace of his whereabouts. Aside from the body of the Accident and Emergency nurse he had followed home and forced to treat his injuries, before he throttled her to death with her own
tights, the day after his flight from
that place.

Amber placed a tea towel over the dust on the newspaper, and then uncapped the bottle of Sailor Jerry.

There were people were in the garden. Men in white suits with elasticated cuffs and rubber boots. Some of them were moving. Their faces were obscured by masks and hoods. The
men moved around the holes they had dug in the black earth. On thin paths made out of slats, they carried blue crates as they walked between the holes.

One of the insertions into the soil had been covered by a white tent. Through the entrance she could see a figure bent over and scraping at something they held close to their face.

Green canvas screens had been erected across the back of the property so people couldn’t see inside the garden, and the maize in the fields, an ocean of waxy leaves swept by the wind all
the way down to where the sea splashed and frothed upon the stony shore, was hidden from her view. But she could hear the crop and the sea out there, the old and eternal sea, hissing.

Underneath the longest limb of the oak tree that grew in the middle of the lawn, four women hung by their necks, their heads cocked like pensive birds. They watched the movement below their
booted feet, as the men in white suits collected more of the brown things that looked like sticks from inside the holes. They put the sticks inside clear bags and then gently placed the sealed bags
inside the blue plastic crates.

A machine juddered and sucked water out of a hole dug close to the house. A woman stood by the machine and smoked a cigarette. Amber wouldn’t meet her eye but knew the woman was looking at
her.

Lights in the sky made parts of the garden white and left other sections in darkness. It was hard for Amber to tell what was shadow and what was a person slipping about in the mud, made worse by
the rain. Amber peered at the night sky. She could see four big lights, but no stars. Sometimes the lights moved over the house, sometimes they just hovered. The sounds of the rotors made her
nervous because she knew she was being watched and filmed.

In the field at the side of her property, through the tree branches, she could see the candle flames of the vigil. She could hear the singing of the women’s group that had been camped in
the field for days.

Downstairs, inside the building, a crowd of people chattered. All of them were talking at the same time as each other.

From behind her back a voice called her name. A man’s voice she recognized and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of Ryan being so near. But there was something wrong with his voice
and when he called to her again, ‘Stephanie’, it sounded as if his mouth was crammed with food.

She turned from the window and looked at the red door of the bedroom, now open and resting against the foot of the bed. From where she was standing the figure inside the bed distracted her from
Ryan; she could only see the top half of a dark body with arms thrown out sideways. The face was covered. The occupant of the bed wasn’t moving.

‘Stephanie,’ Ryan repeated, the word moist, lisping and more slurred than before, as though he was struggling to move his jaw around an oversized tongue. He turned his face away,
dipped his head. ‘Got ver deposssit.’ When he said this she was sure he must have been dribbling, because he made a sucking sound as if to draw something back inside his mouth.

‘I don’t want to be late for work,’ she told him. ‘Can I stay at your place?’ she asked, afraid of the building around her. She didn’t want to stay another
night inside the farmhouse.

The light in the corridor outside winked out and put the already dim passageway into darkness. The lights were on timers. She could no longer see Ryan’s legs in the doorway.

She ran into the corridor on the second floor of the house. This was not where she lived; she lived one floor down, in the room with black walls and mirrors.

She heard Ryan on the stairs, going down. Lights from the garden flashed against the window of the stairwell, but Ryan would not look at her and kept his face turned away as he descended.

When Amber arrived downstairs she couldn’t find Ryan. She kept calling his name.

Down here, it was hard to hear herself think. She wasn’t sure whether the sounds of rustling plastic were coming from the doors that opened onto unlit rooms, or whether the voices were
coming from the walls.

*

The ringing of her phone woke Amber. She sat bolt upright and said, ‘Ryan. I can’t find—’

And then she realized many things all at once: she was lying on the sofa in the lounge of the farmhouse with the curtains closed; her phone was vibrating across the coffee table; the television
was still switched on, and the film must have finished because she could see the DVD menu on the big screen mounted on the wall. She had fallen asleep and had had a bad dream.

Thank God.

But all of this information about her situation and her surroundings confused her. Because someone was running up the stairs outside the room, and she had caught the last of their shadow leaving
the living room as she sat up.

Amber looked at the ceiling.

Footsteps bumped heavily across the floor upstairs, and then stopped.

She reached for her phone and tried to work out which room was directly above the living room.

Your bedroom.

She picked up the phone and answered the call from Josh.

‘Amber. It’s me. I’m—’

She cut him off, her voice so tense she squealed, ‘He’s here.’

‘Just you and me, Amber. There’s no one else inside this house.’

Even though the space at the top of the house was little more than a crawlspace, Josh had gone inside the loft with his Maglite. He’d walked through the entire building swiftly and
silently while Amber waited in the kitchen, holding her breath and anticipating the sound of a struggle from upstairs. But she’d only heard Josh once, opening the doors of the walk-in
wardrobe. He was the third man in a single day to search the premises for an intruder.

Josh slumped into an easy chair in the living room and the leather upholstery wheezed around his shoulders. He was relieved to know his client was safe, she knew that. Josh made her feel safe
and she didn’t have the courage yet to ask him how long he could stay with her at the farmhouse. She knew he was in demand, mostly protecting the children of the super-rich from kidnap. For
the first two years after her emancipation from Knacker and Fergal, she had been constantly surrounded by people. In her third year, she had wanted to be left alone and had begun to believe the
advice of the police that Fergal was long dead. But she now found herself reconsidering her decision to not employ a permanent bodyguard in Devon.

When she’d first met Josh, two years ago, after the publication advance and newspaper serial fee had come through and she was able to privately hire someone to look for Fergal, to augment
the unsuccessful police manhunt, Amber had struggled to believe that Josh had ever been in the military, let alone the special forces. He wasn’t tall and didn’t look athletic; his body
was firm, but bulky, like the old-school English cricket players that her dad had idolized. His hair had gone and he invariably wore an innocuous Gore-Tex coat over loose-fitting black trousers,
hiking boots on his feet. But one consultation covering her personal safety, changing her identity, and how he had tracked criminals and their kidnap victims, had dispelled all of her doubts about
his expertise.

‘The only room I haven’t checked is the locked one.’

‘Study.’

‘The study. But there is no one in your room. I even looked under the bed, but there is no under-your-bed. It’s like a solid plinth.’

‘For good reason. And before you get comfortable, can I see for myself? Or I’ll never sleep.’

‘Of course.’ He stood up. ‘Follow me.’ And paused to eye the gun on the black marble kitchen counter. ‘Either put that away or give it to me. Just knowing
it’s here is the end of my career. You know that. I’m going to need to get rid of it soon, Amber.’

When you find him.
That’s what they’d agreed as a compromise.

Now the danger had passed, though perhaps there had been no danger, Amber was reluctant to touch the gun. Her genuine reticence about firearms seemed to be the sole factor reassuring Josh about
her possession of the weapon; he was happy to pocket the gun and would replace it for her inside the case. ‘Just show me where you keep it.’

‘I’m sorry, Josh.’

‘For what?’

‘Wasting your time.’

‘Your personal safety and peace of mind is not a waste of my time. I was in Worcester on your account anyway, but I’ll be billing you for the digression.’

‘A lead?’

‘Thought it might have been. But alas no. I received information about an assault. The attacker’s description was not dissimilar to our man. Tall. Transient. Facial disfigurement.
Even ginger. Police got him. But not our boy. This chap once had his cheeks sliced back to his ears with a Stanley knife by football hooligans in Cardiff. They were old scars.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I sometimes wish he’d stop by and say enough is enough, people.’

‘I never know where Jesus fits into all this.’

Josh stayed silent and led the way up through the house.

‘God, Jesus, whatever,’ she said, reticent but unwilling to change the subject. ‘I mean, I believe now. You know?’ It was awkward for her to talk like this, and Josh was
never going to be the ideal participant in a discussion of this nature. But it had been a long time since she’d had a conversation with anyone, and maybe that was why she needed him to
listen. ‘I know that there is something else, after this life. But I’m not sure what.’

‘Let’s hope your brush with the other side is not all there is, eh?’

Josh had always been an understanding ally; he had two daughters, the eldest was Amber’s age. He knew about her experiences in great detail and sometimes she sensed the profound effect
they had upon him. Once, Amber had even seen him wipe an eye clear of tears with a thumb, while they went through the evidence about what had happened to the other victims of 82 Edgehill Road. Back
then, Amber pretended she hadn’t noticed Josh’s distress, but his tearful reaction had endeared him to her, and his involvement had remained personal.
Fathers with daughters. My own
would have been the same.

‘Beats looking after the brats of the rich every day, eh?’ he’d said when he finally accepted her custom. Across two weeks he’d deliberated the idea and potential
consequences of taking her on as a client; the delay on his decision was due to his reservations about the
other things
that she had claimed about her time in the house in Birmingham. A
familiar anxiety now bustled anew inside Amber: that if she kept pushing at that side of her experience, one of the few people she could trust might abandon her.