Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

Franklin crept down after him. ‘Anything?’

‘Nope. Just an empty...’ Something glittered in one of the alcoves.

‘What?’

‘Shhh...’ He edged across the dirt floor, playing the torch across the brick.

It was a chain, hanging from a metal ring screwed into the alcove wall at chest height. There was another one in the next alcove, and one in the alcove after that. Four in total, all hanging empty, all fixed to the wall.

Callum cleared his throat. ‘Maybe we should check upstairs. Now .’

They scrambled back up to the ground floor, through the kitchen and up the creaking wooden steps.

Four doors leading off the landing.

He jammed his torch under his bad arm and dug out his phone. Scrolled through to McAdams’ number. Waited for him to pick up. ‘Hello?’

Franklin opened one of the doors and stepped inside.

‘Callum, my new and bestest friend, / Tell me how to make amends, / For all the cruel things I’ve done, / Like kicking you right up the bum?’

‘Shut up and listen. Six Creel Lane, it’s got a basement kitted out like the one at The Cloisters. Chains fixed to the walls.’

‘What about Ashlee, is she there? Have you found her?’

‘Still checking.’

Franklin’s torch beam cast long sweeping shadows out into the room.

‘Well get off the bloody phone and check!’

‘We are . And we need an SEB team over here — tell them to get a shift on.’

Franklin emerged from the other room, shaking her head. Marched over to one of the other doors and disappeared again.

‘Got to go.’ He hung up, got his torch and phone sorted. ‘Franklin?’

No sign of her.

Callum tried door number three — a big empty room with fancy cornices and a big ceiling rose. Probably the kind of place you hung a chandelier if you were the kind of person who owned a chandelier.

Back out into the other room.

‘ Franklin ?’

Nope.

He pushed through door number two. ‘Where the hell are...’

This wasn’t a room, it was a cavern, three storeys tall, dug into the hillside. Or maybe it was natural and they’d just built the house over the front, sealing it in? either way, it was massive.

He’d emerged onto a landing about six foot square, with no handrail. Stone steps descended to the floor twenty, maybe thirty feet below — dim and grey at the very edge of the torch’s reach.

There was another torch down there, though, sweeping across a set of wooden structures — like self-contained rooms, or exhibition stalls. The smell of wood smoke, warm and sweet, mingling with the pungent taint of old fish.

Franklin’s torch swung up towards him, voice echoing back off the stone walls. ‘CALLUM!’ Callum... Callum... Callum...

‘ARE YOU OK?’ OK... OK... OK...

‘I’VE FOUND SOMETHING!’ Something... Something... Something...

He picked his way down the stairs, hugging the wall, torch pointed at the steps beneath his feet.

‘WILL YOU HURRY UP?’ Up... Up... Up...

No.

He walked out onto hard-packed earth, stained almost black.

She was standing in front of a big wooden box, about the size of a large shed, made from rough planks of wood. It stood right next to a big drying rack thing, a good eighteen-foot tall, criss-crossed with notched poles, like the ones they used at Strummuir Smokehouse to be all olde worlde and sustainable.

‘They’ve probably been smoking fish here for generations.’ Callum shone his torch across the box, setting another padlock shining. Fish, and other things.

Franklin pulled the claw hammer from her jacket and wrenched the hasp from the door. The padlock clattered into the dirt.

He nudged the door and it swung inwards.

John wades through the grass to the barn door. Gah... Trousers are absolutely sodden now. But he had to take a short cut from the bothy, didn’t he? Couldn’t go the long way round, by the road, no, that would be too sensible.

Rain batters against his brolly, rolling in, up the valley, in thick grey curls.

Does it never stop raining here?’

The barn has one of those old-fashioned pin-and-bar catches. He clicks it up and pushes through into gloom and the cloyingly familiar scent of wood smoke and dead fish. Nasty and sticky, like every smokehouse he’s visited with DC MacGregor.

A smile creeps across his face. Maybe?

The barn’s walls are stone on the outside, but wood on the inside, the space divided up into three. An area at the front where old wooden fish boxes are piled. An area on the right set up so poles can be hung at various heights over an open fire — there’s still a pile of ashes on the floor where the last burn died out. And last, but not least, an area on the left, sealed away behind a door. No lock, just a metal pin poked through a hasp to stop it opening.

‘PRIME MINISTER AWARDS KNIGHTHOOD TO NEWLY PROMOTED HERO COP!’

John takes a deep breath, pulls out the pin, and steps inside.

Callum edged inside. The darkness was a solid thing, pushing against his chest and throat, thick and syrupy in his lungs. The torch’s beam sliced through it, but the mass healed again soon as the blade was gone.

A metal tank sat off to one side, about the size of a big bathtub, its sides streaked with pale-brown rust.

He edged over, Franklin just behind him, and shone his torch into the tank.

The smell in here isn’t just wood smoke and fish, it’s tainted with a bitter-scented sourness and something that’s half sweet, half horror film.

The gloom seeps out from the walls, leaving just a pale spot of light from the open door.

Should’ve brought a torch with him.

Too late for that now.

John steps forward. ‘Hello?’

Another step.

Then another, scuffing his feet along the dirt floor.

His foot hits something soft and he freezes until his eyes adjust a bit.

‘Oh crap...’

It’s a woman, sitting on the floor slumped to one side, the chain around her throat stretched tight between there and the wall. No point feeling for a pulse, not with her eyes half-open like that, but he does it anyway. The skin’s cold and clammy beneath his fingertips.

At least that explains where the other smell’s coming from.

His stomach does a little lurch to one side and he huffs out a breath.

No being sick. This is a crime scene. They’d never let him live it down.

The rest of the room is finally seeping out of the gloom. Rough wooden walls. Another chain, dangling empty from a metal ring. And a metal tank.

He stands. Marches over, back straight.

‘Pff...’

It’s hard to tell if the body in the tank is male or female. A skeleton, coated in a thin layer of pale skin — crusted with salt just above the filthy waterline. The chain around its neck is looped around a metal pole at this end of the tank, with just enough slack to stop the head disappearing beneath the surface and drowning. Lank, greasy hair, long enough to sink under the surface.

‘Ashlee?’

John drops to his knees and reaches for her neck, two fingers touching the point just beneath her jaw where—

Her eyes snap open.

‘Aaaaaargh!’ He flinches back and goes sprawling on his arse. Sits there, breathing hard. Then laughs. Scrambles forward again. ‘Ashlee, my name’s John, I’m a police officer. We’re going to get you out of here, OK? You’re safe now.’ Another laugh. ‘You scared the living crap out of me, by the way.’

She just stares at him, making little hissing noises from her cracked and bloody lips.

‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’ He pulls out his phone. ‘I’m going to—’

There’s a sound, like ripping fabric. White and cold as the ground rushes up and—