Behind Closed Doors (Season One: Book 7) (Jessica Daniel) (28 page)

‘You know what to do,’ Glenn said reassuringly as Ali started to walk towards her.

Jessica could see how uncomfortable the blade appeared in his grasp. It was long and thick, not quite like a machete but not far off. His arm was trembling as his fingers clenched the handle
tightly; the sure sign of someone not used to holding a weapon.

He wouldn’t catch Jessica’s eye, staring over her head into the woods beyond as he approached. Jessica felt her heart rate increasing, adrenaline starting to flood her body. She
tried to stand but her legs were useless, pained from the kick, stiff from sitting too low. All she ended up doing was falling sideways, her ear clattering into the rough bark of the log. Every
movement Jessica made seemed to make the ties feel tighter as Ali reached her, stepping behind the log and pulling her back into a sitting position.

‘Get on with it,’ Glenn said irritably from across the clearing. Jessica glanced up to see that he wasn’t even watching properly, standing sideways, tapping his foot as if
eager to get into the warm.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Ali said softly, regretfully. ‘I’m not very good with a knife.’

Jessica waited. She had been through many things over the years but through all of that, she had never felt a blade enter her. She’d experienced people using syringes and
stun guns on her, she had been punched, kicked and witnessed a young thug pull out a sawn-off shotgun. Knives were scary weapons though, a twist here, a few centimetres too low there, and suddenly
your intestines were falling out of your body. In the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, they could kill instantly or lead to a long, painful death. With someone who didn’t have
a clue, there would simply be pain. Jessica doubted Ali had enough knowledge of anatomy to know what the difference was.

She closed her eyes, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop it as, unexpectedly, her wrists snapped apart, flopping uselessly by her sides.

Ali stepped around to the other side of the log, the neatly clipped plastic ties in his hand.

‘Sorry if I was too close to your skin,’ he said.

Jessica’s hands had been so full of pins and needles that she hadn’t even noticed the blade next to them.

‘You passed,’ Glenn called out, walking closer. ‘We know you’re a lost soul the same as so many in the house.’

We know who you are.

‘I . . . thank you,’ Jessica mumbled as a reply, unsure what else to say. She was clenching and unclenching her fists, trying to get some feeling back into them.

Ali sat on the log next to Jessica, passing the knife to Glenn, who clipped it onto his belt.

‘I’ll be by the gate,’ Glenn said, walking away into the shadows.

‘What’s going on?’ Jessica asked.

‘Sometimes the group thing in the house gets a bit much,’ Ali replied. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to you since we first met in the games room.’

‘You didn’t have to do all of this!’

Ali apologised, adding: ‘It wasn’t my idea. That’s not what all of this was for.’

‘What was it about then?’

Ali opened up his arms to indicate the house. ‘It’s about everything here. This is the way things are done.’

Jessica didn’t understand.

‘I’ve not had a good time of things,’ Ali continued. ‘It’s this place that has helped me overcome everything.’

The combination of her soaked hair and clothes, the shivering and the clipped chatter of her teeth made Jessica think that this wasn’t the best place to have a cosy chat, even as it dawned
on her that was exactly what Ali wanted. Given everything that had happened over the evening, she figured she might as well oblige.

‘If you were struggling with things, why come here?’ she asked. ‘I understand that it’s working for you but there are lots of other places too.’

‘It’s the house, the location, the people. It’s Moses and the way he talks to you. He wants you to be a better person, which makes you want to be better yourself. Don’t
you feel that?’

‘Moses certainly has something about him . . .’

‘Exactly. I realise I shamed my family with the drink and the drugs but it’s being here that has helped me to change things.’

So vague, so little detail.

‘Is there something specific though?’

Ali glanced away from her, his face half-lit by the moon, which had reappeared and was shining brightly again. He was biting on the inside of his mouth. ‘There was a particular moment that
changed things for me.’

‘What?’

‘It’s awkward . . . I don’t know if I should talk about it. I don’t know if he would appreciate it.’

‘Moses?’

‘Glenn.’

Jessica felt a flurry in her chest, knowing she needed to hear what he had to say. She tried to sound as cool as she could. ‘He seems like a decent guy.’

She didn’t believe her own words but Ali seemed to be warming to her, smiling crookedly as he ran a hand through his dark hair. ‘He is. I know you’re new and sometimes he can
seem a bit abrupt but he does other things too. Like tonight – helpful things.’

‘Like with you?’

‘Yes . . .’

Jessica knew she had him.

‘It was late one evening. I hadn’t been here for too long but I was feeling a bit of withdrawal. You get used to certain things. Mine was living on the streets and drinking. I had
been waking up sweating in the middle of the night, and it was probably clear to everyone that I was struggling.’

‘What happened?’

‘Glenn took me out of the house one evening. I thought he was going to take me off-site entirely, perhaps even expel me, but he led me across the gardens, through this gate and into these
woods.’

He stopped, pointing over a copse in the distance where Jessica couldn’t see.

‘We sat on the edge of this small lake and he simply asked why I was here.’

Jessica knew she somehow had to get a look at the lake, if only to see what was around it. She couldn’t risk asking Ali if there was a greenhouse nearby but now it was clear that the area
wasn’t just a patch of overgrown land left to its own devices. She wondered if she could get away to take a look.

‘What did you say?’

‘Everything I had said before about wanting to get clean and being a better person.’

‘That was what enforced your opinion about everything?’

Ali shuffled uncomfortably. ‘We were only out here for a short time. Glenn told me that if I was committed then I had to prove it, then he started walking back to the house. I didn’t
know what he meant until I returned to my room. On my pillow were bottles of vodka and whisky. I knew straight away that it was a test. I sat there for ages just staring at them, remembering the
taste and the feeling. Later that night, I went to find Glenn and asked him to take them away. After that, there was never another problem.’

Jessica thought that explained the alcohol and drugs she had found in Moses’s office at least to a degree. Their way of deciding who was worthy of staying in the community was apparently
by offering people their vices and seeing who gave in. It also explained how Wayne had got his hands on alcohol ahead of his own breakdown – someone had given it to him. That either meant
Glenn’s outrage at seeing him drunk was an act, or he genuinely didn’t know.

With the tests, like the one she had just been through, some like Ali passed, others like Wayne and perhaps Liam failed. With them both dead, that left Jessica with the obvious question: was
their murder the punishment for failing?

‘Why all of this, though?’ Jessica asked. ‘The bag, the kick, the shoves, the ties. You could have just asked me to come out here and I would have done.’

Ali shrugged. ‘I don’t make the rules. We all have to go through it, though. It questions our motives, making us ask what we’re hoping to achieve.’

Jessica doubted that. They might not be Ali’s rules but the only thing Glenn or Moses were hoping to achieve was to find out what she had told the police.

For the first time in what seemed like a long while, Jessica could feel the tips of her fingers again. She pressed her hands onto the bark and pushed herself upwards, swaying slightly on her
wobbly legs but still keeping balance.

‘I want to go inside,’ she said, unable to stop herself shivering.

Ali stood, placing an arm on Jessica’s shoulder, which only made her colder as it pressed the damp material onto her skin.

As he led her through the woods, Jessica turned from side to side, trying to take everything in. If she could somehow get out of the house, she wanted to remember the route back to the clearing
and then the lake beyond. She pinpointed the taller, spikier trees, memorising the twists and turns in the absence of any path. Ali knew the woods so well he must have been out here a few times
before.

Glenn was waiting by the gate, as he had said. ‘Are you done?’ he asked Ali.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He turned to Jessica. ‘You should know that both Moses and Zip are very pleased to have you here. Hopefully you will become a large part of our community in times to
come.’

Jessica hoped not.

‘Of course, we all hope you will fully embrace the lifestyle,’ he added.

Before giving her a chance to respond, Glenn turned, unclipping the gate and holding it open for Ali and her to pass through.

Jessica wondered exactly what he meant, hoping he wasn’t referring to Moses’s advances.

They started to walk back to the house but Jessica found it slow going, her legs cramping and unsteady across the uneven lawn.

As they began to descend a slope, Jessica stumbled, tripping over a loose twig and collapsing to her knees. Glenn turned, a look that was largely annoyance on his face. She couldn’t work
out if he had any genuine concern for her, or if he simply enjoyed taking people to the woods and scaring them. He took a few steps backwards, offering his hand.

‘Come on,’ he muttered.

Jessica took his hand with her left, placing her right on his belt and hauling herself up with a grunt.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was sitting on that log, my legs went to sleep.’

Glenn turned, shaking his head. ‘Whatever.’

Luckily for Jessica, he was so concerned at wiping his hands on his top that he didn’t notice her slippery fingers sliding across his belt. She flicked the carabiner clip and tugged away
the basement key she had seen him putting there – the one two-thirds of the way around that wasn’t on a big loop. She slipped it into her sleeve, a trick she had been taught by Hugo,
and then followed him the rest of the way back to the house, knowing tonight was the night she would find out what was in the basement.

SIX MONTHS AGO

The doctor might as well have been speaking Swahili for all Jessica cared. She peered over his thinning grey hair at the chart on the wall, reading the letters from the top in
silence, making sure she nodded when he paused.

As a child, she’d loved being able to read every line of the sight chart, starting at the bottom right with the smallest letter, moving up to the biggest one at the top just to show off.
Now she could read the top three lines clearly, make out the one after that if she squinted and have an educated guess about the contents of the fifth line because of the shapes. The bottom two
were a blur of zigzags and swirls.

Around the rest of the room was a variety of charts and posters, a map of the world split into zones showing what jabs you needed where and a multitude of other things Jessica skimmed across so
that she didn’t have to pay attention.

‘. . . How does that sound, Miss Daniel?’

Jessica focused back on the doctor as he addressed her. His face was tired, showing a lifetime of giving people bad news. She wondered how you ever got used to it. She certainly hadn’t,
though it was rarely down to her to do the death knocks in the early hours of the morning any longer. The man in front of her had spent his career telling people they had any number of problems in
their lives that he either couldn’t fix, or would spend a long time attempting to do so with no guarantee he would ever succeed.

When she was young, Jessica’s father always told her she could be anything she wanted to be, pointing up at the planes that flew over and saying she could fly one if she tried hard enough.
He’d say there was a big wide world out there and that she had to find her own place in it. Her mother had always been quieter, almost with an expectation that she would find a nice man,
settle down nearby and give them lots of grandchildren. If she ever got bored, there was still the post office they ran which could be handed down. When Jessica had gone to the hospital after
tripping and cutting the inside of her knee, the doctors and nurses had been so kind that she had asked her father if she could be a doctor when she grew up. He told her that of course she could
– except that it wasn’t all about giving little girls a lollipop to make them feel better.

Now Jessica stared at the doctor’s desk, wondering if there was a tub of sweets in one of the drawers. She felt weary, unable to look at him properly, glancing back above him at the eye
chart.

‘I can’t see the bottom two lines properly,’ she said.

There was a pause. Jessica felt Adam shuffle in the chair next to her. The doctor’s eyes flitted towards him and then back to her.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Daniel, I—’

‘It’s Jessica. I don’t like the formality.’

The doctor sounded flustered. ‘Jessica. I apologise. I was asking if you—’

‘I know what you were asking. I’m just saying that I think my eyesight is starting to go. I used to be able to read the bottom line, no problem. Now it could say anything.’

‘I, erm . . .’

Adam tried to cut in. ‘Jess, we can always get you to an optician if you want but you need to make a decision about what he’s asking you.’

‘E, K, J, that’s the top two lines. Then it’s I, L, P, then M, J, E, B. Although that last one might be a P.’ Jessica scraped her chair forward, squinting as much as she
could. ‘I think the next line starts with a G, but it might be a C. Then it’s I, U, D and I think the last one is a V. After that, I have no idea.’