Adrian Magson - No Tears for the Lost

‘How did you do that?’ Riley queried, referring to the ease with which he’d got through the door. She decided that one of the skills she’d have to ask him to teach her one day was picking locks. It could come in useful if ever she locked herself out one night.

‘I nicked a key,’ he replied shortly. ‘How else? Come on.’

They had already decided on the drive down that if Myburghe kept information about his former activities anywhere, it would most likely be in the office where he’d briefed them on their initial visit. There was a PC and a desk, and both would have to be checked to see what they might yield.

Palmer opened the door and led the way through the darkened kitchen and a utility room, and out into the foyer, which was lit by a small night-light in an alcove. A clock mechanism clacked away noisily nearby, effectively muffling the noise of anyone approaching, and Riley kept close to Palmer, aware of the hostile stare of the portraits looking down from the walls.

Palmer barely hesitated before crossing the foyer to the office door. He tried the handle. The door opened without hindrance. He stepped inside and cursed softly.

The room was a wreck. Papers were scattered everywhere, the PC monitor was humming but tilted crazily to one side, and the drawers to the mahogany desk were lying on the carpet, their contents spread across the floor like confetti.

Riley checked the pictures on the wall for signs of a wall safe. In her experience, even the blindingly obvious sometimes worked. She gave up after the third one when she noticed that it was slightly out of kilter. Whoever had been here before them had already looked.

‘There.’ Palmer pointed with his torch to the side of the desk. There was a dark streak of something down one corner of the polished wood. Riley touched it with her fingertip. It was sticky.

Blood.

Palmer moved towards the door. ‘I’ll check upstairs, you do the ground floor. Don’t go outside.’

Riley nodded without comment and waited for Palmer to disappear. She made a quick search of the ground floor, room by room, using the torch sparingly to avoid tripping over fragile furniture. But there were no further signs of an intruder and none of the disturbance to indicate a search had been made. She went back through the kitchen to the lobby, and stared out into the garden.

Palmer’s warning not to go outside was reverberating in her mind like a challenge. She knew he was the expert in these circumstances, but she felt an automatic resistance at being told what to do, even by him. If she followed the tree line round the house, she figured she would have a better view of the windows and of anyone skulking around where they shouldn’t be, while keeping safely out of sight. She opened the door and slipped outside, then hurried across the grass to the nearest belt of trees.

The smell of pine was powerful out here, with an underlying aroma of rotting vegetation. She trod carefully, wary of dry twigs and rabbit holes, wary, too, of a sudden attack from out of the darkness. She stopped and listened every few yards, trying to distinguish normal night sounds from the not so normal. It wasn’t easy.

The wind in the trees didn’t help. Even a slight breeze sounded like rushing water, effectively cutting off any potential man-made noises such as snapping branches, the scrape of clothing or an involuntary cough. In contrast, it also threw up imagined sounds, such as the ticking of branches translating into a weapon loading, and the falling of a dried leaf like the scrape of a shoe. It wasn’t a venue for the faint-hearted or the over-imaginative.

Riley reached the corner of the stable block, and was about to turn and check the house, when she froze.

The stable block lights were on.

She flattened herself against the wall, her mouth as dry as sand. Walking into a trap couldn’t have been simpler; she would have to enter the open square formed by the buildings, with no sure escape if anyone was waiting for her. If they were and made themselves known before she entered the central block, turning and heading back into the woods would only be an option if she could run faster than her pursuer. Entering the building made even that a non-starter.

She glanced back at the house and saw several lights burning along the top floor. She knew instinctively what Palmer was doing: he was drawing attention to himself, trying to lure anyone in the grounds back to the house. It was all the opportunity she was going to get, so she stepped round the corner of the first stall and through the open door.

The air was as she recalled previously: musty and smelling of straw. She put her fingers over the lens of her torch and flicked it on. In the restricted glow, she saw the same pile of discarded tackle covered in dust. But no horses. And no baddies with big guns or knives.

Someone had left a pitchfork against one wall, the tines spotted with rust and the handle worn smooth with use and broken off halfway down. Riley picked it up and held it like a lance. It might not be much, but if the person who had ransacked Myburghe’s office was here, it was better than going in empty-handed.

She sneaked a look around the door towards the central building where she’d seen the anteroom and sleeping quarters. Bright light spilled out from the door and a couple of small windows, but she couldn’t hear a sound. She ghosted past the other stalls, a faint swish of weeds and grass sprouting from the cobblestones brushing her ankles. She checked each stall, her relief growing as each one proved empty. Then she was outside the anteroom.

She sniffed. There was a strange smell in the air; one that hadn’t been here before. It was almost sweet, slightly heavy, and the explanation for it lurked in the back of her mind, just out of reach.

She shook her head, refusing to be spooked by the unknown. After all, what could there be here that she hadn’t seen the other day? Bracing herself, she stepped through the doorway into the light.

What she saw was like a slap in the face, and her every instinct was to scream and not stop.

Rockface was staring down at her from the far wall, a giant, grotesque gargoyle, his bloodless face frozen in agony.

***********

Riley felt a surge of something bitter rise up and threaten to spill out across the floor. She swallowed hard. Not that it would have made things any worse; what she was looking at was beyond anything she could think of. Against every fibre of her being, she forced herself to look again.

Rockface was hanging on the wall like a side of beef.

He had been stripped naked, his wrists tied by orange baling string to the two heavy brackets Riley had noticed the first time she came in here. Even with his height, they were positioned a good two feet above his head, and the weight of his body bearing down had made the string bite deeply into the flesh of his arms. A couple of lengths of the same string had been looped beneath his chin to keep his head up, so that at first glance he seemed to be watching the doorway, his face distorted into a lop-sided grimace. If he had been standing at any time while tied up, his strength had long given out and he had slumped downwards, his knees now bent and giving his trunk a curiously elongated appearance, like a reflection in a fairground hall of mirrors. He had lost some of his impressive build, making him seem thinner and less awesome; shrunken, even, as if starved over a long period of time.

Riley was torn between the instinct to check for life signs and the scalp-tingling desire to run from this awful place and get help. But even as she overcame her fear and stepped closer, she realised that the former bodyguard was beyond any assistance she or anyone else could give him.