Val McDermid - Crack Down

Silence. Blackness. I slipped into the carpeted hall and left the door on the latch. Slowly, painstakingly, I inched forward down the hall, my right hand brushing the wall to warn me when I reached the living-room doorway. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out a patch of lesser blackness on the left. The stairs. As I drew level, I paused and held my breath. I couldn’t hear a thing. Feeling slightly more relaxed, I carried on.

The living-room door was open. I moved through the doorway tentatively, scared of tripping over furniture, and closed the door softly behind me. I switched on the big rubber torch I’d taken from the van’s glove box and slowly played it over the room.

It was like two separate rooms glued together in the middle. In the far end of the room, the walls were painted cream. There was a cream leather armchair, a pair of school desks with child-sized chairs, and a pair of bunk beds complete with satin sheets. Where there should have been a light fitting hanging from the ceiling there was a microphone. At the midpoint of the room, a camcorder was fixed on a tripod, flanked by a couple of photographer’s floodlights.

The other half of the room, where I was standing, was like the distribution area of a video production company. There was one of those big video-copying machines that do a dozen copies at a time, a desk set up for home video editing, boxes of Jiffy bags and shelf upon shelf of videos, one title to a shelf. Titles like, Detention! Bedtime Stories and You Show Me Yours …There were also sealed packets of photographs. Now I began to understand why kids were being handed free drugs that would smash their inhibitions to smithereens and make them see the funny side of being exploited to hell. I could only come up with one explanation of what was going on here, and the very thought of it was so sickening that part of me didn’t want to hang around checking the evidence. The only thing that forced me to do it was the thought of some smartass from the Vice Squad doing the ‘so if you didn’t look at these videos, how do you know they weren’t Bugs Bunny cartoons?’ routine on me.

I picked a title at random and slotted it into the player on the editing desk. I turned on the TV monitor. While I waited for the credits to come up, I slit open a packet of photographs. Twelve colour five-by-sevens slid out into my hand. I nearly lost my fish and chips. I recognized the blond man who’d left earlier in the Toyota, but the children in the shots were, thank God, strangers. I’d have been fairly revolted to see adults in some of those poses, but with children, my reaction went beyond disgust. At once, I understood those parents who take the law into their own hands when the drunk drivers who killed their kids walk free from court.

If the photographs were bad, the video was indescribably worse, all the more so because of the relentlessly suburban locations where these appalling acts were taking place. I could barely take five minutes of it. My instincts were to empty a can of petrol on the carpet and raze the place to the ground. Then common sense prevailed and reminded me it would be infinitely preferable if those bastards ended up behind bars rather than me. I switched off the video and ejected the tape. I picked up the photographs and stuffed them inside my jacket. I grabbed another couple of videos off the shelf. The night relief at Longsight police station were in for an interesting shift.

I stood up. I heard a sickening crunch. My eyes filled with red, shot through with yellow meteors. A starburst of pain spread from the back of my head. And everything went black.

Mosquito. Unmistakable. High-pitched whine circling my head, in one ear and then in the other. Bluebottle. Low, stuttering buzz mixing in with the mozzy. You wouldn’t think two little insects could make enough noise to give you a splitting headache, I thought vaguely as I surfaced.

Then the pain hit. You know when you catch your finger in a door? Imagine doing that to your head, and you’ll start to get the picture. The sharp edge of the agony snapped my brain back into gear. In the tiny gaps between waves of pain and nausea, I started to remember where I’d been and what I was doing when something seriously brutal put my memory on pause.

As that memory returned, so my senses started to catch up. I still couldn’t force my eyes open, but my hearing had recovered from its dislocation. I wasn’t hearing a mozzy and a bluebottle. I was hearing a voice. The words drifted in and out, like listening to a pirate radio station on the edge of its transmission area. ‘I don’t fucking know how she got in,’ I heard. ‘I was fucking sleeping, wasn’t I? Look, it’s your job to sort out problems…’ The voice tailed off. The silence was blissful.

Moments later, the voice started yapping again. This time, I registered that it was a man. ‘I don’t give a shit what you’re doing. Look, you’re paid to do this sort of thing. I’m just paid to copy videos and be here, not whack people over the head with tripods. You’d better get your arse over here now and deal with this cow.’ Silence again. Then the voice, higher pitched, angry. ‘You’ve already been paid once to warn her off, and it didn’t work, did it? So you’d better come round here and finish the job or else I’ll have to ring Colin and tell him you’re not prepared to turn out, and he won’t be pleased about that, not being disturbed this time of night.’

It finally dawned on me that this was me he was talking about. If I’d had the energy to be afraid, I’d have been gibbering. As it was, the immediate prospect of being executed helped focus my mind even more. My eyes still refused to open, but I became aware of a shooting pain in my shoulders and managed to work out my position. I was suspended by my wrists, which were manacled by something warm and solid that was biting into the flesh. My hands were jammed up against what felt like hot and cold water pipes. My body was dangling, my legs were crumpled under me, not actually taking any of my weight.

Before I could test whether it was possible to shift my weight to my feet without making a noise, the voice started yammering again. ‘Look, it’s your responsibility. She’s got to be dealt with, and now. She’s seen the videos, for God’s sake. You might want to spend the next ten years being buggered by some Neanderthal in the nick, but I don’t.’ He paused. ‘Fine. You better be here, that’s all, or I’ll be right on the phone to Colin. And if you want another wage packet like today’s, you won’t want me doing that.’ I heard the sound of a phone being slammed down. The jangling crash cut through my head like a blunt axe, snapping my eyes open.

I closed them to a slit at once, eager to look like I was still out for the count. If I had any chance of getting clear of this place before the hit man arrived, it was by playing dead and hoping my captor would leave me alone. Through my lashes, I could see I was in the kitchen, the fluorescent light a stab behind the eyes. At the far end of the room, the man who’d been using the wall-mounted phone turned towards me. He was tall and slim, his gingerish hair tousled from sleep. He had a neat, full moustache that jutted out like a ledge above thin lips and a sharp chin. The bleary eyes he focused on me narrowed vindictively. ‘Bitch,’ he said, savagely tightening the belt of his towelling dressing gown.

I knew him. Not his name, or anything like that, but I knew him. I’d seen him around, in the local shops, and in Manto’s café bar on one of the handful of occasions I’d been in there waiting for Richard. We were on nodding terms, talking about the weather in the corner-shop terms. It was hard to get my head round the idea of being trussed up by someone I knew. I’ve never had the slightest desire to explore S&M, and I sure as hell didn’t want to start now.