What She Saw (33 page)

‘Is that where he was held since his abduction?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't involved until three days ago.'

Rosen ran for the rear exit of the building, for the car park at the back of Isaac Street.

‘Is Paul Conner involved?' Bellwood asked and, with the same breath shouted, ‘Sergeant Murphy!'

‘I don't know. I wasn't involved until three days ago.'

‘Where's Paul Conner?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Has Macy got your gun?'

‘I don't know. Maybe. I gave it to Paul. She ordered him to gun the CCTV. It wasn't me.'

As Sergeant Murphy came running, Bellwood saw Rosen turn the corner. ‘Back to his cell, sarge!'

And in a handful of strides, she was round the same corner and on her way out.

The sky outside was thickening with dark clouds. Between the clouds, the form of the moon was made bright by the unseen setting sun.

84

6.44 P.M.

O
n Lewisham High Street, Rosen hit ninety mph in the thick of traffic. He slowed down to sixty, as cars, taxis and motorcycles crawled onto the pavement and into the central section to allow him through. He clipped the rear of a Fiat Punto and urged, ‘Come on, come on, come on!' to a double-decker bus that didn't have room to move. He craned his neck. Red, red and amber, green, amber, red. . .

Slowly, the bus shifted and pulled aside for him to overtake.

Bellwood had the whole team connected to her iPhone on a conference call.

‘David, everyone, listen. You're going to have to cut the sound on the siren and hope the other motorists are alert to the flashing blue light. We're on the edge of hearing range of the lock-up. If Macy hears the siren coming, she'll run for it.'

Rosen turned off the siren and weaved sharply into the left-hand lane to take a turning into St Vincent Hill, the road that led directly to the lock-up. The car ahead of him slowed, the driver rattled.

‘Climb the bloody pavement but get out of the way!' shouted Rosen, the pulse in his neck banging like a war drum. The car slowed and stalled. Rosen slammed on his brakes and pulled up sharply at the bumper. He shot his window down and, leaning out, waved
the car behind him back, back, back.

The driver reversed and Rosen followed, pulling right to overtake the stalled car in front of him and then swerving deftly back into the left-hand lane. He took the corner at forty-five mph and accelerated to ninety again as he coursed up St Vincent Hill. Traffic lights. They dropped down to red. A pedestrian crossing. A woman with a baby in a buggy stepped into the road. ‘Get back!' Bellwood yelled from the open window at her side. The woman pulled the buggy back sharply so that she and her baby were on the pavement as Rosen burned the red, touching one hundred.

‘Slow down, David.'

He slowed down, asking, ‘What's that?' Ahead was a traffic sign diverting vehicles from making the turn towards George Grove. He pulled up at the nearest stretch of pavement and stopped the car.

Bellwood was out and running before his key was out of the ignition. He got out, looked back, saw Leung and Corrigan jumping out of his car, then Gold racing from Feldman's car. He waved them on. Within moments, they streamed past the row of houses just ahead of George Grove towards the lock-up.

Bellwood was almost there. Rosen felt a blossoming of heat in his chest but kept running as fast as he could.

Bellwood was at the lock-up, on her hands and knees and peering under the bottom of the roller-door on the unit second left, near the end of the row.

‘It's open,' she said.

She got the fingers of one hand under the door and waved Corrigan, Feldman and Gold back as they arrived. She put her free hand under the door and raised it just as Rosen arrived, breathing deeply, sharply, his nerve-endings on fire.

The door was up by ten centimetres.

‘Back off, Carol!' said Rosen. ‘They could have Trent's firearm, a petrol bomb even.'

Silence. Bellwood walked backwards, slowly and away. In the middle distance, a baby cried, and the ordinary noise was astonishing. The moon appeared in outline as a bank of cloud fell away.

Gold and Feldman took up position on either side of the garage door. Rosen stood at an angle off-centre of the door but directly in front of it. Bellwood and Corrigan stood on either side of Rosen, the five officers forming a square, a human shield.

‘Macy, come out. It's me, Mr Rosen.'

Nothing.

‘Do you have Luke?'

The wind rattled an empty Coke can along the rough concrete surface of the ground.

‘Is Chester with you?'

Inside the lock-up, a mobile phone rang out.

Rosen walked forward two paces. Gold and Corrigan each took a corner of the door and counted each other in, ‘One, two, three!' With a powerful lift they raised the shutter. Bellwood shone her torch into the darkness.

On the back wall inside the lock-up, four sets of symbols from the Celtic oracular alphabet were spray-painted with an aerosol.

‘Keep your light on it, Carol.'

The phone, just by the open doorway, went on ringing.

Corrigan picked it up, connected the call.

‘Chester, where are you?' It was his mother. ‘I'll come and get you. Where are you, son?'

‘I'm sorry, it's not Chester. I'm a police officer. DS Corrigan.'

‘Have you found him?'

‘We're still looking.'

On the other end of the line, she howled.

Rosen studied the symbols and Bellwood asked, ‘What does it say?'

He checked the notes he'd made from Macy's borrowed library book and, after a few moments answered, ‘It says,
All gone. Too late
.'

85

7 P.M.

A
t the back of Bream Street Primary School was a field surrounded by the same tall metal railings that bordered the front elevation, playground and the service and delivery yard on the other side of the school.

At the edge of the field, at the base of the railings, was a narrow hole and it was here that Macy stopped with Luke and Chester.

‘What we doing back at school?' asked Chester.

‘We're going to break in,' she whispered.

‘No shit!' He looked amazed and overjoyed, and then fear crept in. ‘What. . . what if we get caught?'

‘It's the safest place for us. What did the bad guys tell me? Hey?'

‘That they were going to come for me and Luke next. Tonight.'

‘School's the one place they won't come to. And when this is all over, we'll be able to sell our story to the papers. How much money would you like?'

‘A million quid.'

‘Why just a million, Chester?'

‘Two million? Two million.'

‘You get in through that hole and then I'm going to pass little Luke under, so you pull him in, gently, gently, so he doesn't start crying. And then I'll crawl through.'

‘We're really going to break in?'

‘I've got it all figured out.'

‘You know what I'm going to do when I get inside?' asked Chester, as he shuffled through the tight space and under the railings.

Macy looked up at the moon and sighed. Luke grabbed her hand and squeezed her fingers. ‘Big boy Chester's going to help you climb under the railings. He'll tug your feet and then I'll come after you. OK.'

‘My mum?'

‘She's gone to work. You know that. She goes to work. I take care of you.'

‘Want home now.'

She reached into her pocket for a cube of chocolate and fed it to him.

‘School now. Home later.'

He munched the chocolate and nodded. ‘'K, Macy.'

She covered his face with her hand to protect it as Chester pulled Luke through and under the railings. She felt a shadow pass over her and looked back, but there was nothing there.
Just the wind
, she thought,
just the cold, cold wind
.

‘I'm going to have a shit on Mrs Price's chair in her office. Imagine her face when she sits down on that on Monday morning.'

‘There isn't going to be a Monday morning,' said Macy, softly, her eyes drawn upwards to the moon.

‘What was that about the morning?'

‘Chester, you're going to have to be very quiet from now on and follow everything I say and do. Understand?'

‘I understand. I'm not stupid. I walked Luke all the way from Bannerman Square to the lock-up. By myself. No one saw.'

‘We're going to hide behind the bins until twenty, twenty-five past eight and then we're going to break into the school.'

‘I don't want to hide in the bins. They stink.'

‘Where are we not allowed to go?'

‘The bins.'

‘Chester, we're breaking all the rules tonight.'

‘We are, aren't we?'

As she dipped down to the ground and squeezed through the hole, she looked up at the face in the moon, but the eyes were covered by a drifting band of cloud.

On Beltaine Night, it appeared the moon was blind.

86

7.10 P.M.

T
he same blind moon sat silently over Bannerman Square.

Rosen had reconvened the 6.45 P.M. meeting from Isaac Street to the Bannerman Square mobile incident room, central to the area to be searched again.

In a corner of the crowded room, Rosen stood with his back half-turned to the other officers, listening stone-faced to Henshaw's observations about Macy Conner.

‘I went over everything – school books, what I've seen and heard about her, her drawing – with Professor Reese. We went away for an hour and independently wrote a diagnosis. Broadly, we came to the same conclusion. Reese is the leading authority on what we both believe Macy Conner suffers from. Your officers need to know.'

Rosen called for order, steeling himself against the sadness he felt for Macy and the unbearable fear of what she was capable of.

The last members of the murder investigation team squeezed into the mobile incident room. Outside, uniformed officers waited, each group of four assigned a detective from Rosen's team. Teenagers milled around behind an invisible cordon, weighing up the police presence, knowing that something was in the wind.

Sombre quiet descended.

‘This has got to be quick,' said Rosen. ‘The time scale's on your handouts. This is plan A and is based on the information we have to hand. Expect further instructions as we get developments. You've each got an individualized handout. You've each got four uniformed officers to assist you and a geographical location to search. We're looking for the three children whose faces are on the wall behind me: Macy Conner, Chester Adler, Luke Booth. Be careful: Macy Conner is a very dangerous little girl. Approach her as if you're approaching an escaped class-A prisoner. If you find her, contact me ASAP. She could be carrying a Smith & Wesson gun. So far, blunt instruments, petrol and fire are her weapons of choice.'

‘Are you certain?' a voice blurted from the room.

‘No. But we'll proceed on the basis that Macy Conner is a killer and that she'll kill you if she needs to. James Henshaw has a psychiatric perspective. Please listen very carefully to what he tells you about this child.'

Henshaw stepped forward.

‘Quick as you can, please, James,' said Rosen, quietly.

‘Macy Conner is a damaged little girl. She's delusional, suffers from intense, one could say almost religious, hallucinations that are not only animated but are sustained over many months. Due to one stream of delusion and hallucination, she's currently in a state of intense grief and mourning, so this already-unbalanced child is deeply destabilized. You're all aware that both DCI Rosen and I came to the conclusion that the murders of Thomas Glass and Stevie Jensen were the work of a collection of individuals, a quasi-religious cult. That is both right and wrong. On top of all her other problems, Macy has a condition called MPD – multiple personality disorder. I suspect, as a conservative estimate, she has two main personalities residing in her consciousness. Based on her account of the night Thomas Glass was burned alive and graffiti left at the scenes, they're both male, complementary psychopathic thugs with religious convictions that exonerate any action
they take. If you come across her, you could be in the presence of either of these personalities. Dig deep into your personal experiences of dealing with men such as these. You could well meet up with them tonight. How does this work from Macy's point of view? Imagine living in a house with no front door, with two very sick neighbours who could walk into your home at any hour of the day or night and take over your most personal space. That's what life is like for Macy Conner. She's either in hell or standing at the door of a place we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. She's been neglected and abused, traumatized from a very, very early age. When that's the daily reality, the only place that the child can escape to is inside the mind. One last thing. When she was four, she fell down the staircase of the flats where she lives. She was given a brain scan.'