Simon Beckett: Whispers of the Dead

The distant tap dripped in the silence. Paul and I stared at each other. I could see his mouth frame a question.

Then York lurched through the archway.

The undertaker was barely recognizable. His dark suit was filthy and stained, his hair matted. The cords on his neck stood out as thick as pencils as he screamed at us, brandishing a long-bladed knife in both hands. Even from where I stood I could see the blood on it, staining his hand black in the poor light.

My limbs felt numb and heavy as I grabbed the wooden strut I’d dropped.

‘Get her out!’ I told Paul, my voice unsteady, and stepped out to face York.

He came towards me at a shambling run, roaring as he slashed the air with wild swipes of the knife. The strut seemed pathetically flimsy in my hands. Just give them time. Forget everything else.

‘Wait!’ I yelled. Or thought I did; afterwards I was no longer sure if I’d actually said it out loud.

‘Drop the knife!’

The shout came from the corridor leading to the stairs. Relief surged through me as Gardner emerged through the doorway, Jacobsen close behind. Both had their guns drawn, levelling them at York in a two-handed grip.

‘Drop the knife! Now!’ Gardner repeated.

York had turned towards them. His mouth hung open, panting. There was time to think he was going to do it, that this was going to end here.

Then, with an incoherent scream, he lumbered at Jacobsen.

‘Stay back!’ Gardner yelled.

York yelled something unintelligible but didn’t stop. Jacobsen seemed frozen. I could see the pale fixity of her face as he bore down on her with the knife, but she didn’t move.

There were two loud cracks.

They were deafening in the tiled confines of the room. York seemed to trip. He stumbled sideways, falling into the big wall mirror. It shattered as he collapsed on to a drinking fountain, dragging it to the floor in a cascade of plaster and silver fragments.

The echoes of gunfire and breaking glass slowly died away.

My ears rang painfully. A faint blue mist hung in the air, a bonfire reek of cordite overlying the stink of decomposition. York didn’t move. Gardner hurried over. Still pointing the gun at him, he kicked at the hand holding the knife to knock the weapon away, then quickly knelt and felt at York’s throat.

Without urgency, he stood up and tucked the gun back into his belt clip.

Jacobsen was still holding her own gun outstretched, although now it was pointing down at the floor.

‘I—I’m sorry,’ she stammered, as colour rushed back into her cheeks. ‘I couldn’t…’

‘Not now,’ Gardner said.

There was a sudden sob from the treatment room. I turned to see Paul helping Sam to sit up, trying to calm her as she coughed and gasped for breath. He’d cut the windlass strap, but a livid red line circled her throat like a burn.

‘Oh, G-God, I thought… I th-thought…’

‘Shh, you’re all right, it’s all right, he can’t hurt you now.’

‘I c-couldn’t stop him. I told him I was p-pregnant, and he said… he said that was good, that he wanted to wait until, wait until… Oh, God!’

She doubled up as a contraction rocked her. ‘Is she OK?’ Gardner asked.

‘She’s in labour,’ I told him. ‘You need to get an ambulance.’

‘On its way. We were heading back to Knoxville when I got your message. I put the call in for back-up and paramedics right away. Christ, what the hell were you thinking?’

But I’d no time for Gardner’s indignation, or to ask how they’d managed to find us so quickly from my garbled directions. Sam’s face was screwed up in pain as I went to her.

‘Sam, an ambulance is on its way. We’re going to get you to a hospital, but I need you to tell me if you’ve any other wounds or injuries apart from your throat.’

‘N-no, I—I don’t think so, he just put me in here and left me! Oh, my God, all the bodies outside, they’re all dead…’

‘Don’t worry about those. Can you tell me when your contractions started?’

She tried to concentrate as she panted for breath. ‘I don’t… in the ambulance, I think. I thought it was some mistake when he came to the door. He said I should call Paul but when I turned my back he… he put his arm round my neck and… and squeezed…’

She was describing a chokehold, I realized. Done properly it could cause unconsciousness in a matter of seconds, with no lasting after-effects. Misjudged, it could kill just as easily.

Not that York would have cared about that.

‘I couldn’t breathe!’ Sam sobbed. ‘Everything went black, and then I woke up in the ambulance with this pain… Oh, Lord, it hurts! I’m going to lose the baby, aren’t I?’

‘You’re not going to lose the baby,’ I told her, with more confidence than I felt. ‘We’re going to get you out of here now, OK? Just sit tight for two more minutes.’

I went out into the spa, pulling the door to the treatment chamber closed behind me. ‘How long till the paramedics arrive?’ I asked Gardner.

‘Out here? Maybe another half-hour.’

That was too long. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Parked out front.’

That was an unexpected bonus. I’d thought they’d have come across the hillside as Paul and I had, but I was too concerned about Sam to wonder about it for long.

‘The sooner we get Sam out of here the better,’ I said. ‘If we get her to your car we can meet the ambulance on its way.’

‘I’ll get the wheelchair from upstairs,’ Jacobsen offered.

Gardner gave a short nod, and she hurried out. Grim-faced, he considered the corpses in the plunge pool.

‘You say there’re more outside?’

‘And in here.’ With a pang of regret, I told him about Summer’s body lying in the other treatment chamber.

‘God almighty.’ Gardner looked shocked. He passed a hand over his face. ‘I’d appreciate it if you stayed behind. I need to hear what happened.’

‘Who’s going to drive them?’ Paul was in no fit state, not with Sam as she was.

‘Diane can go. She knows the roads better than you do.’

I looked at the corpses lying on the floor of the spa. I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I already had. But I’d trained as a GP, not an obstetrician. I knew Sam would be best served by someone who could get her to the ambulance as soon as possible.

If I belonged anywhere, it was here.

‘All right,’ I said.

Gardner and I stayed by the unbolted French doors after Jacobsen left with Sam and Paul. It had been decided it was better for them to go out that way rather than risking carrying her up the rotting staircase. Gardner had phoned to check on the progress of the back-up and ambulance, then gone to see if there was another way out through the spa. He reported that the rooms beyond the archway were blocked off.

‘Explains why York didn’t just take off,’ he said, dusting off his hands. ‘Must’ve been down here when you came in and couldn’t get out without going past you. Looks like half the floor above has collapsed through there. Whole damn place is being eaten by termites.’

Which in turn had attracted the swamp darners. York’s own hiding place had given him away in the end. There was a poetic justice there, but I was too tired to spend long thinking about it.

Jacobsen said little before they left. I guessed she was still reproaching herself over her failure to shoot York. Hard as it must have been, for a field agent that sort of hesitation could be disastrous. If nothing else, it would leave a black mark on her record.

If not for Gardner it could have been far worse.

When they’d gone neither he nor I made any move to go back inside. After the shuttered horrors of the spa, emerging into the sunlight was like being reborn. The breeze carried the smell away from us, and the air was sweet with grass and blossom. I breathed deeply, trying to clean the foulness from my lungs. From where we stood, the trees screened what lay in the garden. With the green mountains rolling to the horizon, it was almost possible to think this was a normal spring day.