The Bug House (17 page)

When he was a kid they’d put him on Ritalin and Dexedrine and Strattera and so many other drugs he used to rattle when he walked. But that was because they assumed, wrongly, that his violent tendencies were linked to hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder when in fact that was just the way he was hard-wired. Eventually they started giving him prescriptions for antidepressants – which was great news for his mother, Barbara, who had already developed a chronic addiction to them. With his mother doped out of her mind and his father – well, who knew where his father was – Jimmy was pretty much left to his own devices. These manifested themselves in truancy and petty theft and the occasional minor assault; but fortunately he had his Uncle Howard to vouch for him, which meant he stayed out of care. But Howard Iley wasn’t there the night he’d battered the kid in the park, which was why he ended up doing four years in Frankland.

These were the best years of his life. The years when he really got his shit together.
Learned
about life. About taking care of his body and his mind. Treating each as a vital component of a unified whole. When he went into prison at eighteen he was a skinny runt of a kid. When he came out at twenty-two, after four years of steroids and pumping iron, he was more like a god.

*   *   *

Like most sociopaths, Jimmy is highly intelligent. He is also a narcissist, and like most narcissists, what he craves most is attention. When he gets attention, Jimmy is a pussycat.

He will do anything.

Right now he’s got Alex Vos tied to a chair and he’s taking pictures with his phone to check the lighting levels and shooting angles. He knows that everything has got to be perfect and he is determined to make it so, even down to cleaning the puke off Alex’s shirt to make him look presentable for the camera.

She is waiting for me
, he thinks, pausing to drain a can of Red Bull down in one, and the prospect makes his caffeinated blood flow even faster through his pounding heart. For a moment he feels light-headed and has to hold on to the wall until the sensation passes. When it does he catches sight of himself in the darkened glass of the phone and he pauses again, this time to flip the video viewer so that he can see himself on the screen.

Yes
, he thinks, pressing Record.

He moves across to the other side of the room, where the natural light spills in through the open window, and he props the phone against the brickwork so that it faces him. Slowly he peels off his T-shirt and the contrast between light and shade creates deep, scalloped shadows across the sculpted ridges of his chest and torso.

Yesss
.

Eyes fixed on the screen, he tilts his head and draws a finger down from the point of his chin to the base of his throat, following the raised line of the ugly scar. The finger continues down, following the contours of his pectoral muscles, slowly circling the puckered areola around the nipple and then teasing the nipple itself. He wishes she could be here to see him now, because he knows this is what she likes. What she has always liked: his
maleness
, the animal within him. He is already hard, but when he thinks about her looking at his body he becomes harder still.

‘
Uuuuuuhhhh
.’

Jimmy stops. His head twitches with annoyance. He turns and glares at Alex Vos, who is moving slowly in the chair as consciousness returns. The cocktail of drugs they’d put in his drink last night is wearing off. Alex groans again and Jimmy swipes him across the face with the back of his hand, a blow of pure spite.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ he says, standing over Alex and wanting nothing more than to stamp his head to a pulp. But if he did that, he knows that she will not be pleased, because her instructions are very precise.

He reaches down and effortlessly straightens the toppled chair with one arm. He brushes the dust from Alex’s hair and shirt and he checks to ensure his hand has left no mark on the boy’s face. Satisfied, he retrieves the phone and begins the laborious process of calculating lighting and shooting angles once again.

According to the ghost of its website, High Plains Stables is a high-class livery yard with custom-built Loddon boxes, an all-weather floodlit area, permanent round pen and year-round grazing on well-managed permanent pasture.

But that was five years ago.

The access road through Tranwell Woods is now a glorified single track that only sporadically changes to a metalled surface. Because of the rain, large sections of it are underwater; the potholes that lurk beneath the surface could be anything up to a foot deep, more than enough to crack the axle of Vos’s saloon. The two detectives are a quarter of a mile from the stables when Vos decides they will abandon the car. They leave the track and continue through the wood on foot until eventually the trees begin to thin and the track terminates at the remains of the stable complex itself.

The entrance is set in a low wall, and beyond is a collection of low buildings dominated by a large barn made of brick and corrugated iron. There is a white Ford panel van parked outside the barn, spattered with mud.

‘Turn your phone off,’ Vos says.

‘Don’t you think we should call for back-up, sir?’ Ptolemy says.

Vos says nothing. A figure has emerged from one of the far buildings and is now walking towards them, dodging the puddles and the mud slicks as he makes his way to the van. A man: tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a T-shirt and three-quarter-length cargo pants despite the chill. Filthy blue Crocs on his bare feet.

S-shaped scar across his neck.

‘Well, where the hell are they, Mayson?’ Seagram shouts.

‘I don’t know. I went to get some lunch and when I got back, they had gone.’ Mayson Calvert’s calm voice is piped like soothing mood music though the speakers of Seagram’s car as she speeds along the winding country roads, one hand on the wheel, the other clamped around a menthol cigarette. ‘Have you tried phoning him?’ he says.

‘Of course I have. But his phone must be turned off.’

‘That’s strange,’ Mayson says. ‘I’d have thought that under the circumstances he’d have it turned on all the time. What about Ptolemy?’

‘The same.’

‘What do you want me to do, Bernice?’

‘Call Anderson. Tell her what’s going on. Tell her where I’m going and tell her that Huggins and Fallow are meeting me there.’

‘What about back-up?’

‘Get some back-up as well. And forensics. Just get
everybody
, Mayson.’

Jimmy Rafferty is whistling as he opens the rear doors of the van. He reaches in and drags out a large metal toolbox, which he effortlessly flips on to his shoulder. Then he turns, kicking the doors shut, and makes his way back through the stable yard. Vos and Ptolemy move forward from the trees to the entrance of the yard, past a rotting wooden sign showing a smiling cartoon child in riding gear mounted on a pot-bellied horse.

Rafferty has reached the round pen, a circular brick building with a conical steel roof, punctuated around its circumference by open rectangular viewing windows. The entrance is a large double door with a rusting padlock hanging loose from its hooks. He pauses to take the toolbox down from his shoulder, then goes inside, leaving the door ajar.

‘Call Seagram,’ Vos says. ‘Tell her where we are and that we need back-up.’

‘What about you, sir?’

I
’
m going to get my son
.

Bernice Seagram is doing eighty when she enters Whalton village and only slightly less when she swerves off the main road and through the gates of Jack Peel’s drive. She sees Fallow’s car parked at an angle by the house, doors hanging open; there’s a couple of patrol cars nearby with their roof-mounted arrays activated and a yellow-jacketed traffic cop standing guard by the front door of the house. Yet the scene fills her with sick apprehension, because there is no sign of Alex Vos.

She brakes hard and her seatbelt is disengaged before the vehicle skids to a standstill on the gravel. Now she is out of the car and running towards the house, ID in her hand, and then she is in the house itself, hurrying along the plush-carpeted hallway towards the sound of voices coming from the drawing room, where Huggins and Fallow are standing with their backs to her; and when she calls their names they turn and separate and there is Kimnai Su, perched on the very edge of a high-backed armchair in the drawing room, her tiny hands clasped on her knee, her tiny feet so close together it looks like they are bound at the ankle, dressed in subdued black – a high-collared cotton tunic with just a hint of brocade at the hem, wide-bottomed silk trousers, canvas slippers.

‘Where is she, Mrs Peel?’ Seagram hears herself say in a voice so measured she would not have believed it was hers.

Kimnai Su tilts her head to one side as if listening for the faint sound of running water.

‘I don’ know,’ she says.

Which is when Seagram slaps her hard across her face.

‘Where’s Melody?’

*   *   *

Jimmy Rafferty learned many things in prison – how to steal, how to fence, how to extort, how to kill – but most of all he learned how to hate.

It is a skill that he prizes more than any other on the outside.

To hate is to rid yourself of every last molecule of emotion and then ensure that the vacuum remains intact. Emotion is the enemy. The disease. It is the minuscule crack in the wall that can bring the whole building crashing down.

Only hatred is pure.

When Melody told him what the Turk had done to her that day when they were alone in her father’s club – where he had put his filthy hands, the disgusting suggestive words he had spoken – Jimmy had been insanely angry and jealous and vengeful, just as he had been that night when he was eighteen and he’d caught that kid talking to Shona in the bar. But that night he had been out of control. His actions had been fuelled by emotion and he had paid the price.

This time it was different. He knew what to do, how to purge himself. And when she told him what she wanted him to do, he was ready.

The plan was simple: she’d contacted him, invited him over to see her in Newcastle. Got him up to the hotel room at the airport, where the filthy bastard must have thought all his Christmases had come at once.

But it was Jimmy who was waiting for him.

‘I want him to die screaming, Jimmy,’ she’d said.

And that’s precisely how he’d died.

Vos runs to the pen, keeping low until he reaches the brick wall. He creeps around the perimeter, away from the door, until he is crouched down beneath one of the viewing windows. Now he can hear Rafferty inside, pacing, muttering to himself. Thumping himself in the chest, slapping his own face with his open palms. The noise reminds Vos of a boxer preparing to go into the ring.

A cage fighter
.

Then there is silence.

Slowly, agonizingly, Vos raises himself up until the top of his head is level with the bottom of the window. He takes a breath, holds it and then lifts his head above the ledge.

The pen is probably sixty feet in diameter, with a bare concrete floor, except for stray patches where it is covered in dirty wooden pellets. Rafferty is standing in the centre of the pen, feet astride a drainage channel, facing the far wall. He has removed his shirt, exposing a broad, tattooed back. His arms are raised, his hands pressed together above his head. He is breathing heavily, the powerful exhalations bouncing sharply off the bare brick walls and the sloping metal roof. On the floor by his feet is the toolbox. Directly in front of him, tied to a wooden chair, his head lolling on his chest, is Alex.

Vos ducks down again. He closes his eyes, but the image of his son is seared on his retina like pure bright light.

No. This is not going to happen. I am not going to let you harm him
.

Inside the pen, Vos hears a soft moaning sound. It is getting louder and louder and he realizes it is Rafferty. He raises his head again and sees Rafferty now with his arms wide and his head thrown back, howling up at the roof.

Now
.

Oh, she
’
d loved him for what he
’
d done. Told him he was a real man, someone she trusted to look after her now that her daddy was gone. She
’
d told him that soon they would run away and be together forever
.

But there was one more thing she wanted him to do for her
.

One more act she required as proof of his devotion
.

And she told him about how her daddy had died, pushed from a fire escape by a bent copper who would never face the consequences because of who he was and what he represented
.

‘
I want him to suffer like I did, Jimmy
,’
she whispered into his ear
. ‘
I want him to know what it
’
s like to lose someone you love
.’

*   *   *

With a single movement, Vos vaults through the window. He lands heavily but regains his balance and starts running towards Rafferty. The sound of his shoes is deafening on the concrete and Rafferty half turns, a puzzled look on his face as if he’s just woken up. At that moment Vos crashes into his exposed midriff with all his power, knocking the younger man flying backwards with a roar of pain and surprise.

The two men crash to the floor just a few feet from Alex’s chair. Vos is momentarily on top and although Rafferty is the stronger man, he has enough of an advantage to allow him to dig the point of his elbow into Rafferty’s throat. He can feel Rafferty’s hands clawing at his shoulders, his neck, his face; he feels his own flesh ripping, sees his own blood dripping down onto Rafferty’s contorted face. Yet he feels no pain, just the energy of his own rage channelled through his arm as he bears down on the man who meant to kill his son.

‘
Boss!
’

You will never take away from me the thing that I love the most. I will kill you myself before I allow that to happen
.

‘Boss. That’s enough!’

He stops. Looks down at Rafferty, at the lolling tongue and the bulging eyes. Hears the faint whimper of his fading breath. Suddenly the energy evaporates and he slumps to one side, allowing Ptolemy to rush in and snap the cuffs on Rafferty’s wrists.