Steven Dunne - The Disciple

He closed his eyes but reopened them at once. Someone or something was definitely moving around outside his tent. He lifted his head from the makeshift pillow and followed the source of the noise. Beyond the mound of his feet, framed by the moonlight, Brook could see a shadow on the other side of the canvas. The paper-and-comb noise of a zip unfastening sent Brook scrabbling for his torch. Flicking it on he trained it on the tent’s flap, but this didn’t halt the unfastening — it merely hastened it.

Fully alert now, Brook sat up and cast around for a weapon. He reached for his walking boots but the mention of his name turned his muscles to solid ice.

‘Who is it?’

‘Damen. Damen. It’s me.’ Brook didn’t recognise the little-girl voice. ‘Laura.’

Brook’s heart, already working hard, went into overdrive. Sweat dotted his forehead. ‘Laura?’

The flap opened and a pretty young girl popped her head through the gap.

She smiled at him and proceeded to crawl into the tent on all fours. ‘Laura Maples. You must remember,’ she grinned. Her skin was pale and she wore nothing but the briefest silk night slip, which did little to conceal her small breasts as she climbed onto his sleeping bag. ‘I’ve come to thank you for Floyd,’ she smiled and proceeded to unfasten his sleeping bag.

‘What?’

‘You must remember Floyd,’ she said. Her smile vanished and she massaged her neck briefly, then showed her fingers to Brook. They were covered in blood. ‘I do.’ She moved towards him, recovering her smile, and climbed on top of him.

Brook shone the torch onto her unblemished peach-fuzz face. He felt a hand pulling at his sleeping bag. ‘Stop.’ He grabbed her hand — it was icy cold.

‘Please, Damen. Just once for love.’ She pushed his arms down and kissed him with her frosty lips. Brook could feel her soft flesh trembling in her too thin slip and tried to pull away, but she pressed closer to him for warmth, her tongue beginning to search for his.

A stench so foul Brook thought he might retch made him push the girl away and he swung the torch back to her face. The blackened skull and orbs of her eye sockets glared back at him and he shrank back to the wall of his tent, almost collapsing the frame. The broken beer bottle protruding from her neck glistened in the artificial light, grimy panties still dangling from its neck — testimony to her killer’s final incriminating act.

‘You’re not real,’ shouted Brook. He darted the torch this way and that, searching for her corpse. She had gone. Brook heaved a sigh. A second later he felt the movement at his feet and knew at once what it was. He scrambled to pull the sleeping bag off his legs but the seething, roiling mass of rats struggling for air at the bottom of his fetid bed gouged and scraped their way to freedom over his quivering torso.

Brook sat bolt upright and took several huge gasps of air. When his heart returned to near normal, he poked a bleary head out into the sharp, cold air of the morning. Although only wearing underpants and T-shirt, he spilled out onto the sopping grass and raised his six-foot frame to its full height, welcoming the fingers of dawn massaging their faint warmth into his face.

He closed his eyes and rubbed the fatigue from them. It had been years since he’d dreamed of Laura Maples, dreams he thought he’d left behind forever. Her killer, Floyd Wrigley, was in the ground — Brook had seen to that — and his nightmares had been buried with him. Or so he had thought. Two nights in a row. He heaved a final huge sigh. Something was wrong.

He looked at his watch and scrabbled back inside the tent, emerging with a box of matches inside a plastic bag. The first two matches he removed failed to ignite, but the third obliged, and Brook slid it under the kettle of his one-ring camping stove and made some tea.

Brook returned to the tent, dressed quickly, then packed his sleeping bag, camera and other meagre possessions into the side of his rucksack.

He then set to work taking down his quick-erect tent. He worked rhythmically, occasionally looking around as he folded, but there was no landowner or farmer to complain this early in the morning.

Brook packed his stove, kettle and mug and struck out down the path that would eventually spit him out into the small hamlet of Milldale, on the River Dove in Derbyshire’s Peak District. Forty minutes later he was standing on Milldale’s ancient footbridge, admiring a nearby heron and feeling the warmth of the low sun spread its balm.

He clambered up the steps to the municipal toilets. After an icy wash, Brook gazed at his bleary face in the cracked mirror. He then set off up the path next to the river that would eventually take him to his home in the village of Hartington. He walked steadily, ignoring the hunger gnawing at his tight belly and feeling quiet pleasure at the newfound strength in his legs and shoulders. Two weeks of wild camping, walking fifteen miles a day and eschewing alcohol and cigarettes had left Brook feeling as fit as he had in years. But the dream of Laura Maples gnawed at him. What did it mean?

Brook power-walked the last mile into Hartington and up the small hill to his front door, stopping only briefly to get a pint of milk and a loaf of bread at the corner shop. As he was extracting his keys from a side pocket, his eye wandered to the small, lavender-scented front garden of Rose Cottage next door. He noticed that the ‘To Let’ sign, which had been there for many a month, had now been taken down and laid flat along the side wall of the cottage. At the same time, he noticed that several upstairs windows had been opened to air the place out.

He unlocked his front door and stepped into the porch, kicking the large pile of unopened mail to one side. As soon as he entered the inner door he heard the urgent ping of the answer phone alerting him to messages. Two weeks away, two messages. He pressed the play button.

‘Hello, sir. Hope you’ve had a good holiday wherever you’ve been.’ It was DS John Noble. ‘I thought I’d give you the rundown on The Reaper book. It came out on Tuesday and got a fair amount of attention. Brian Burton was interviewed on East Midlands Today apparently — I didn’t see it. Surprise, surprise, he has a go at you in it, about the way the investigation went, you know the routine, and the BBC rang up to find out if you or the Chief Super wanted to be on with him. The Chief’s said no. As he doesn’t know you all that well, he’s fretting that you might get sucked into saying the wrong thing. Don’t worry, I told him you don’t talk to anyone if you can help it, least of all journalists …’

Brook smiled at this and muttered, ‘No comment!’

‘Anyway…’ The message cut off at this point but was picked up again in the next one. ‘It’s me again. Just to say I’ve taped the interview for you if you can face it. I’ve also left a text on your new mobile just in case you actually manage to take it with you, remember how to turn it on and have learned how to access your messages. Unlikely, I know. See you tomorrow. Oh, BTW,’ Brook rolled his eyes, ‘Jason Wallis was released a couple of days ago. Thought you might want to know.’

Brook’s expression hardened. ‘So you’re out at last, you murdering little coward.’ He made some tea and took a sip while glancing through the side window at the memorial to his slaughtered cat. He reflected on the night two years ago when he’d risked everything and played The Reaper, holding Jason hostage, confronting him with his crimes and threatening to cut his throat unless he turned himself in for the murder of Annie Sewell, an old woman in a sheltered home.

He looked back to the cat-shaped stone. He’d underestimated Wallis. A week later Jason and his crew had come after Brook, wrecking his down-at-heel flat and killing his cat.