Safe House (36 page)

‘Try
Chester
,’ I said.

‘Are you serious?’

‘The missing dog. This poster has been here since I first came up to the cottage. I think Laura created it. I think she left it for me to find.’

‘It’s a hell of a risk. Anyone could have taken it down.’

‘They could have, but they didn’t. Try it. Type
Chester
.’

Rebecca sucked on her cheeks, then flipped open the laptop and typed the word
Chester
into the dialogue box that appeared on screen. Her hand hovered over the keyboard. She hit
Enter
.

The laptop croaked. It whirred. Then it emitted a sound. A new one. No bum note this time. It was a jaunty, upbeat
ding
.

The dialogue box expanded on the screen. An icon appeared.

‘MPEG,’ Rebecca said, as if she might have expected as much. ‘A video file.’

‘So what are we waiting for? Play it.’

*

The guy with the shard of glass in his leg had got a hold of himself. At first, he’d panicked. That was something he couldn’t deny. The pain had been immediate and startling, and the sight of the glass poking out of him had been sickening, but it was the blood that had really scared him. The sheer volume of it. He knew there were a lot of major arteries and veins collected around the inner thigh. He knew that a severe loss of blood could cause death within minutes. So his reaction had been understandable. But he knew it wouldn’t be forgiven.

The girl had got away. All he could do now was limit the fallout.

His every instinct screamed at him to remove the glass. He had to fight against it. He had to focus his energies on freeing one hand from the wound and reaching inside his pocket for his phone. Then he had to force himself not to call his colleague. He needed to contact him for help, but it couldn’t be the first thing he did. His superior would check. His superior would verify the order of events in precise detail. He had to send the message before he did anything else.

His hand was coated in blood. It made his fingers slippery. And he was shaking and trembling. It made texting hard. But he was a determined guy. He was determined to send the message so that he could call his colleague straight afterwards.

The number was easy to find. He had it stored in his phone under the letters
IQ
.

The text was short. Necessarily so.

It consisted of just two words.

Girl gone
.

Chapter Fifty-three

The digital video file opened in a new window on the laptop screen. A graphic in the bottom right-hand corner stated that it was seven minutes and fifty-seven seconds long. The video began playing automatically. There was no sound.

An angled, full-colour shot looking downwards from the top right-hand corner of a stylish living room. The room is dominated by an L-shaped sofa in cream leather. The sofa is sitting on stripped wooden floorboards, just behind a glass coffee table, and is overlooked by a floor-mounted lamp. There is also a wall of fitted bookshelves, a sleek stereo system, a glazed cabinet filled with drinking glasses and a comfortable armchair upholstered in blue fabric.

A Caucasian male is reclined on the sofa, his age approximately thirty. He is bare-chested, lean and straggly, with pasty skin. He wears a pair of low-slung charcoal jeans, with no socks. His beard is full and dark brown. Stringy dreadlocks hang around his bony shoulders. He is reading a paperback book.

The armchair is occupied by a young woman with short blonde hair. Her tanned legs are tucked beneath her. She wears a pink T-shirt over simple white briefs. In one hand, she holds a pot of nail varnish, and she is using a tiny brush to apply the varnish to the nails of her free hand.

‘That’s Lena Zeeger,’ I told Rebecca.

‘I assumed as much,’ she said. Her tone was clipped, as if she didn’t welcome the interruption.

After precisely twenty-three seconds, a third person enters the scene. Another woman. Another blonde. She has her back to camera. She is dressed in a dark-blue trouser suit, a small handbag hangs over her shoulder and she carries a white plastic shopping bag. The bag is stretched and drooping, as if it contains a heavy object.

Lena looks up at her with an expression somewhere between tedium and nonchalance. They engage in a short conversation. The woman appears tense. Her movements are sharp and abrupt. She gesticulates with her spare hand, raising her thumb, followed by two fingers, as if she’s counting off three separate points she wants Lena to acknowledge. Lena shrugs and returns her attention to her nails.

The woman shakes her head, as if exasperated, and steps towards the glazed cabinet. She selects two glass tumblers. Then she removes a long-necked bottle of vodka from her shopping bag. She pauses, drawing a deep breath, then unscrews the bottle and splashes a generous measure of vodka into both glasses. She sets the bottle down on the cabinet next to the empty bag, lifts both glasses and turns sideways to hand a drink to the man on the sofa.

That was when my breath caught in my throat. When I jerked my head closer to the screen and felt everything become hyper-real. The cut of her hair. The shape of her eyes, nose, mouth. The way she held herself. The way she cocked an eyebrow at the man, like he was taking liberties.

The blonde woman was my sister, Laura. Unmistakably her. But also, unlike the Laura I knew, she appeared hard and uncompromising. Her jaw was set. Her eyes narrowed. She looked tough. Tougher than I’d known she could be.

I resisted the urge to press my fingers against the screen. I blinked tears from my eyes and tried to hold back the tide of emotions that gushed over me.

The skinny man accepts the vodka. He raises his glass in a silent, mocking toast, and takes a sip. He nods his approval and returns his attention to his book.

Laura straightens her spine and raises her eyes to the ceiling. Then she sets the second tumbler down on the floor by Lena’s feet. She hovers, as if expecting some thanks, but after a few seconds more, she roughly adjusts the strap of her handbag and marches out of shot.

The time on the video file reads 1.33.

Very little happens for the next minute or so. The man on the sofa flicks a page of his book. Lena finishes painting her fingernails and blows on to them. The man on the sofa takes another sip from his vodka. Lena bends down and scoops up her own glass and does likewise.

They begin to talk. They drink some more.

Then, at close to the three-minute mark, Lena’s head droops abruptly and her teeth strike the rim of her glass. She jerks her chin upright and blinks her eyes in an effort to rouse herself, like a bus passenger fighting a spell of drowsiness. She’s unsuccessful. Her face sags again. She lowers her legs from her chair, as if to stand, but her legs are feeble and she crashes to the floor, dropping her glass and spilling vodka across the floorboards.

The skinny man springs to his feet, upsetting his own drink across the sofa cushions. He kneels by Lena’s side, turns her face upright and lowers his cheek to her mouth. He shakes her roughly by the shoulders. Then he turns and pushes up on one leg, as if to fetch help, but his balance fails him and he lists precariously to one side like a drunk.

He strikes the ground on his hip and immediately attempts to push himself up. His movements are weak. He kicks out with his legs and thrashes with his arms like a beached fish, but his actions become vague and after a few final twitches his face slaps down against the bare floorboards.

Lena and the man lie prone and undisturbed for more than half a minute.

Then, at 4.23, the camera shakes violently and tilts a degree to the left, cutting off a portion of the top right-hand corner of the room. It’s as if a sudden, localised vibration has upset the camera in its housing.

Two men wearing balaclavas burst into the scene. One advances on Lena, the other paces towards the skinny man.

The first man scoops Lena into an upright position, allowing her body to sag against the blue armchair, and checks her breathing. He is fast and powerfully built. He wears black cargo trousers with multiple pockets, a long-sleeved black T-shirt and black leather gloves. He pokes one gloved finger inside Lena’s mouth and hooks her tongue forwards. Lena’s head lolls to one side, her tongue hanging from her mouth.

Meanwhile, the second man lifts the bare-chested figure by his armpits and drags him towards the sofa. He heaves him on to the soft leather cushions and arranges him so that he is sprawled against the backrest, his head pivoted towards the ceiling, his jaw gaping open and his dreadlocks spread around his shoulders.

The second man is sturdier than his companion. He wears a grey suit over a light-blue shirt and a dark-blue tie. A black nylon backpack is fitted over his shoulders. He also wears a pair of black leather gloves. The man gathers up the spilt glass tumbler and holds it close to the skinny man’s lips. Once he sees breath condense against the glass, he reaches up and removes his balaclava. The man is easily fifty years old. His scalp is hairless and his ears are flushed.

The first man follows his lead and tugs his own balaclava from his head. He is considerably younger. His hair is clipped short, like an army buzz cut, and he has a fuzz of hair below his bottom lip.

For perhaps five seconds, the first man grins inanely at his older companion. Then the older man says something to him and the first man reacts like he’s been scolded before reaching into a pocket on his cargo trousers and removing a small glass vial and a hypodermic syringe. He upends the vial and pierces the seal with the needle. He withdraws the plunger and measures the dosage he requires.

At the same time, the second man gathers up Lena’s tumbler. He slips his backpack from his shoulders and stuffs both tumblers inside. He fetches two fresh tumblers from the glazed cabinet, pours a shot of vodka into each glass, and spends a few moments fitting Lena’s hand around one glass and the skinny man’s hand around the second glass, until he is satisfied that their fingerprints have been successfully transferred.

Watched by the first man, he sets the glass bearing Lena’s fingerprints down on the floor next to her, and tosses the glass branded with the skinny man’s fingerprints across the already damp sofa cushions. He returns to his backpack and removes a white cotton cloth that is sealed inside a plastic ziplock bag. He uses the cloth to carefully clean the bottle of vodka. He wipes the bottle down thoroughly, then carries it across to Lena and with the help of his accomplice, takes her limp right hand and fits it around the bottle in several different ways, applying several different grips. Once the job is done, he returns the bottle to the top of the cabinet and the cloth to the little ziplock bag. He grabs the white plastic shopping bag and shakes it until a paper receipt tumbles out on to the cabinet‚ then stuffs the shopping bag and the ziplock bag inside his backpack.

Next, he adopts a position behind the sofa. Seizing the skinny man’s gaping jaw in his gloved hands, he angles the man’s head to one side, exposing his neck.

The first man steps away from Lena with the syringe and the glass vial in his right hand. He sets the vial down next to the vodka bottle on the glazed cabinet, flicks the syringe with his nail, flexes his arms and nods to his companion.

The move looks to be something they’ve rehearsed. It’s a procedure they carry out with speed and efficiency. The younger man stabs the needle into the skinny man’s neck and compresses the plunger. Then he removes the needle and they both step away.

The effects of the drug are very fast and very disturbing. The skinny man doesn’t regain consciousness. His eyes don’t snap open. But his body bucks and jerks, and his legs kick out, as if he’s fighting something in his sleep. He arches his back and his chest heaves. He wrenches his head from side to side, his dreadlocks slashing his face. He flails once with his arm. His throat bulges and his lips peel back over his teeth. His skin reddens. Before long, he goes into seizure, convulsing rhythmically, mouth frothing, until, when the footage reaches 7.02, he stops moving altogether.

The two men don’t concern themselves with his suffering. While the older man scans the floor space for anything they may have missed, his younger companion takes the syringe and the glass vial across to Lena. He starts with the glass vial and very carefully fits Lena’s left hand around it. He lifts her index finger and rolls the glass around its pad. Then he takes her right hand and repeats the process with the syringe, being sure to press her right thumb down firmly on the plunger. Once he is satisfied, he collects together the syringe and the glass vial and carries them out of shot. He returns within twenty seconds, his hands empty.

The men check the room one last time and ensure that Lena is still breathing. Then they vacate the scene for good.

The footage continues for a further six seconds, and neither Lena nor the skinny man moves in the slightest.

I leaned away from the laptop. Blew a gust of air from my lips.

‘Well,’ I managed, ‘I recognised everyone except the skinny guy on the sofa.’

Rebecca turned her face away from me and gazed out her side window. She raised her hand to her mouth. There was a long moment of silence.

‘That was Alex Tyler,’ she finally said, in a pinched voice.

I supposed it had to be. Lena’s dead boyfriend. The eco-campaigner.

‘Tell me I’m not going mad,’ I said. ‘We’ve just watched a murder, haven’t we?’

Rebecca nodded, still peering out her window. ‘Not just a murder,’ she said, absently. ‘A comprehensive framing, too. Who were the men?’