Behind Closed Doors (Season One: Book 7) (Jessica Daniel) (21 page)

More baying.

‘Most of all, you’ve let yourself down.’

More thumping of the table, more shrieks, and finally Moses had what he had been trying for as Kevin collapsed to his knees in tears. All the while, Glenn stood watching impassively.

If it hadn’t involved real emotions, Jessica would have been impressed. In a packed room, Moses knew what to say, when to say it and – perhaps most importantly – how to phrase
things. In just a few minutes, he had wound up over twenty people, simultaneously breaking one person’s spirit.

Now he paused, breathing in the atmosphere, in his element.

In his own way, he was as dangerous as Glenn and Jessica suddenly realised why the smaller man felt he could be insolent. It was because he offered the operation something completely different.
He was the brawn, the muscle, but Moses would always hold something over him because he could make a room turn with just a few words.

Jessica fixed her eyes on Glenn, who was standing with his knees slightly bent, ready for Moses to say the word. He hadn’t stopped looking at Kevin.

‘We all know what you’ve been through, Kevin,’ Moses said softly. The change in tack was something Jessica sometimes used herself in interviews. Using somebody’s name was
a way of bringing them back into a conversation or interrogation if you thought you were losing them – either that or a way of letting them know that you were one of them.

Kevin glanced up from the floor, face drenched with tears to meet Moses’s eyes again.

‘You’ve been doing so well,’ Moses cooed. ‘All your past problems were behind you. You were mixing well with everyone, making friends, becoming the person you once were
again.’

‘I know.’

‘But all the time, you were hiding this secret.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Moses paused, breathing in the room again. He ran his fingers through his beard, separating a few strands and then clumping them together.

‘Do you wish to stay here, Kevin?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

Jessica knew he couldn’t possibly have missed it because she had heard the reply perfectly, despite Kevin’s tears and blocked nose.

‘Yes,’ he repeated.

‘Then you realise that you must face the consequences of your actions?’

‘I know.’

Moses stood tall, finally nodding to Glenn. ‘Take him downstairs.’

The first part of the meal had happened almost in silence but no one apparently felt like finishing their food after Kevin had been led away by Glenn. He hadn’t even
fought.

Afterwards, they all went off to their various study sessions. The subject of Jessica’s was what they thought of rule-breaking. Jessica went along with everyone else, saying how much it
disgusted her. That was despite the fact that at various points in her career, she had broken and entered, burgled a house, lied, and many other smaller things that she guessed probably
wouldn’t be approved of by the group. More than any of that, of course, was that the core things they thought they knew about her identity were false.

Still, what was one more white lie in among a group of people so brainwashed that they couldn’t see the madness of everything around them?

Jessica was looking for an opportunity to ask the one question she had but it didn’t come during the session. She didn’t particularly want to mix but it was the only way she might
get her answer, so she headed to the games room when they were finished. Heather was already there, trying to play darts.

Jessica crossed the room to stand next to her.

‘Do you want a go?’ Heather giggled. ‘I’m rubbish.’

In the canteen at Longsight station, there used to be a dartboard set up that featured photos of various local lawyers, or printouts from the police website of whoever had pissed them off that
week. It had been taken down ahead of an inspection and no one had ever seen it again. For a group of people who were supposed to investigate thefts for a living, the fact the culprit had never
been identified was a stain on everyone’s character.

Jessica took the darts from Heather, trying to match her enthusiasm as she nailed three into the twenties.

‘Good shot,’ Heather said.

‘Beginner’s luck,’ Jessica replied dismissively.

Heather took the darts back, launching the first one into the wall above the board.

‘Where does Kevin work?’ Jessica asked, trying to sound casual.

Heather’s second dart landed in the black circle around the board.

‘He’s a handyman, he fixes things around and about the house.’

Jessica thought that could explain why he hadn’t simply been exiled in the same way as Wayne. If he was actually useful, it was no surprise Moses and Glenn would want to keep him around.
This way, they also had him even more in their debt for letting him stay.

‘There was one thing that puzzled me at dinner,’ Jessica said.

Heather’s final dart pinged into the centre of the treble-twenty.

‘Well done,’ Jessica added.

Heather sounded disappointed. ‘I was aiming for the bullseye.’

As they walked to the board, Jessica lowered her voice. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

Heather plucked the three darts from the board and handed them over. Playing the friend card had worked and she stepped closer to Jessica, whispering: ‘What do you want to know?’

‘With Kevin, Moses told Glenn to take him downstairs but I didn’t know there was anything under here.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ Heather replied, walking back to the end of the makeshift oche. ‘There’s a basement. I thought I’d shown you it on the tour.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Do you remember the door underneath the stairs? The ones that don’t go anywhere.’

‘That’s it? What goes on there?’

Heather raised her eyebrows, looking Jessica in the eyes. ‘I’m not sure but if I were you, I wouldn’t go out of your way to find out.’

Jessica didn’t want to push by asking too much more. She hung around the games room, putting on a show of fitting in without doing too much to actually engage. Nobody
seemed particularly concerned that Kevin had been taken to the basement, probably meaning it had happened before and that they expected to see him again.

The entrance under the stairs was almost directly opposite the doorway to the games room. Jessica remembered seeing it on the tour with Heather, thinking it was simply a storage cupboard. She
had walked past it time and again without knowing what it contained. Given the size of the rest of the house, the basement could potentially be enormous.

For some reason, the door to the games room always seemed to be left open. Jessica positioned herself close to it, playing cards with Abigail, Heather and one of the men. Lunchtime and
after-work card games around Longsight station might as well have been a contest between the men to see who had the biggest genitals given the competitiveness involved. In her younger days, Jessica
had learned to play poker but hadn’t joined in for years, the male-driven atmosphere a little too much for her.

Playing cards in the house was an altogether more serene affair. The only game Heather knew was rummy, so Jessica spent hand after hand bored senseless, keeping an eye on the door.

Eventually, there was a clunk and a clang and the door underneath the stairs opened. Jessica didn’t want to appear overly interested but didn’t have to worry because everyone moved
towards the door of the games room anyway.

Glenn was standing in the hallway, hands on hips. Kevin crawled out from the doorway under the stairs with a groan. His face was speckled with cuts and bruises, parts of his neck and throat
already turning purple. At first Jessica wondered why Glenn wasn’t telling them all to leave, or at least close the door. ‘Move along, nothing to see here,’ was something everyone
had said in the force at some point. There could be a mid-air plane crash, debris landing across a motorway causing a hundred-car pile-up with untold carnage and flames shooting far into the sky,
yet there would still be a constable somewhere with a roll of blue tape telling everyone there was nothing to see.

Glenn didn’t even face them, though he must have known he was being watched. He waited for Kevin to haul himself to his feet and then waved towards someone out of view. From the other side
of the stairs, the woman who had attended to the man who hit his head on the marble step came over. She peered at Kevin’s injuries, muttering something too low for Jessica to hear, then,
wrapping an arm around his waist, she led him away.

As he turned, Jessica expected Glenn to be angry at the undue attention, but he simply nodded towards everyone standing in the doorway. Calmly, he relocked the door under the stairs, slipping a
thick key into a slot two-thirds of the way around his belt, and then headed up the stairs.

Gradually, everyone returned to what they were doing but there was definitely less of an appetite to have fun. Jessica knew the reason Glenn hadn’t minded people watching was because it
suited his and Moses’s aims if everyone knew exactly what could happen to them if they broke the rules. If they were useful, they would be taken to the basement and punished. If they
weren’t, it was banishment. Anyone who had been fully indoctrinated into the ways of the house and who couldn’t remember what it used to be like in the outside world would willingly
take the beating.

Jessica hadn’t seen anyone except Glenn leave the basement with Kevin, so could only assume he was responsible for enforcing discipline. No surprise but one other thing she could tell
Charley.

As Heather drifted away to talk to someone else, Jessica caught Abigail’s eye. ‘Is that normal?’ she asked, nodding her head towards the basement.

Abigail shrugged, unconcerned. ‘If you want to stay, you live by the rules.’

Jessica was weighing up whether she should drop a hint about the greenhouse, wondering if Abigail might have an idea of what or where it was, when the alarm that usually signified wake-up and
dinner started to ring. Perhaps it was because she was downstairs, as opposed to in the bedroom, but it sounded louder to Jessica. She pressed her palms to her ears, trying to shield herself from
the noise.

She looked around, confused, but all the others had stopped what they were doing and were now moving towards the door.

‘What’s going on?’ Jessica shouted to Heather.

She couldn’t hear the reply over the din but the single word wasn’t difficult to lip-read: ‘Trouble.’

It was hard to describe the atmosphere in the hallways. Not only was there the small group leaving the games room but other people were emerging from various parts of the house. It felt calm and
panicked at the same time, people walking, not running, all heading steadily up the stairs. Yet each person’s face was a mixture of bemusement and worry, betraying the composed nature of the
way they were moving.

On the middle floor, the alarm was even louder and everyone Jessica saw had their fingers fully in their ears. Jessica had initially assumed there was a fire, or a drill for one, because that
was what she usually associated with such a noise, especially at this time of the night.

Instead of going outside and away from it, people were heading back to their rooms, meaning it had to be something else. Jessica followed until she and Heather were in the bedroom. She lay on
her bed, unable to focus on anything. The piercing wail sizzled through her so fiercely that she could feel it as much as she could hear it, even with her fingers firmly pressing on her ears to try
to block it out.

When it eventually stopped, it took Jessica a few moments to realise the sound had gone. She could still hear a faint ringing, removing her fingers and glancing around the room to see Heather
sitting on the edge of her own bed, hands by her side.

‘It’s stopped,’ Heather said, stating the obvious.

‘Why was it so loud?’

‘I’m not sure. We’ve had these alarms before – it means something is happening.’

Heather’s voice sounded faint, almost tinny, as if Jessica was hearing it through an old battered speaker.

‘Like what?’ Jessica asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What was going on the last time it went off like that?’

Heather shrugged. ‘If we needed to know, we would have been told.’

That was the type of reasoning that meant Heather probably wasn’t cut out for policing when they eventually got out of there.

Feeling a little unbalanced as she stood, Jessica tapped her ears to try to make them feel normal again. Even though the noise had stopped, she could still hear a faint buzzing. She wobbled
slightly, using one of the bedposts to hold herself up. It had been one of the most disconcerting moments of her life.

Jessica moved across to the window, nudging the curtain aside to try to get some sense of where she was. It was dark but the moon was high and the skies clear, casting a bluey-white glow across
the gardens. She stared into the distance, towards the ridge of the driveway and the far side where the gate was out of view. Gradually, her balance began to return until she felt more like
herself.

It was only then that she noticed a flicker of movement directly below. She had to press against the glass to be able to see anything as the angle was too steep but there were undoubtedly people
on the turning circle, directly in front of the house.

‘There’s someone out there,’ Jessica said, gazing at all the activity.

‘You should move away from the window,’ Heather replied firmly.

Jessica didn’t want to be seen to be directly ignoring what might well be house rules but she had no intention of stepping away either.

‘Moses and Glenn are outside,’ she added, shuffling slightly to the side to try to peer around the impossible angle. There was a gentle glow of yellow light spilling from the inside
of the house, where the front door must be open a fraction.

She could see only the tops of their heads and they were very close to the doorway. A few metres ahead of them, there was a group of five or six people, all wearing dark clothing. It
hadn’t been a particularly cold day and Jessica doubted it was that cool an evening, but the figures were all wearing hats or what could even be balaclavas.