Anthony Horowitz - Raven_s Gate

He had taken a taxi to a police records office in south London. Everything he needed was there in a cardboard box, one of about a hundred, filed away with a reference number and a name: FREEMAN M.J. There were articles cut out of the local newspaper in Ipswich, reports from both the local and the metropolitan police, a post-mortem report and a psychiatric assessment from a doctor who had been attached to the case. The story was exactly as he had been told. A road accident. The parents killed. An eight-year-old boy left behind. Adoption by an aunt in Ipswich. Mallory had read all of it before. But then, at the very bottom of the box, he had stumbled on a witness report that he hadn’t seen. It changed everything.

It was a signed statement by the woman who had been living next door to Matthew at the time of the accident; she had in fact been looking after him when it happened. Her name was Rosemary Green. Mallory read it twice, then ordered a taxi to take him to Dulwich. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He doubted she would be in.

But he had been in luck. Rosemary Green was a teacher and arrived home just as he stepped out of the cab. He talked to her outside her small Victorian house with pink and white honeysuckle trailing all the way up the front wall. It was strange to think that Matthew Freeman had once played in the garden next door. It couldn’t have been a more different world from the one he would later inhabit in Ipswich.

Mrs Green didn’t have much to add to what she had already said. Yes, she agreed that her story didn’t seem likely, but it was true. She had explained it to the police at the time and she stood by it now, six years later.

Mallory had drunk two miniature bottles of whisky on the train back to Ipswich. A copy of Matthew’s file was on the table in front of him, as well as the late edition of the Evening Standard. The newspaper belonged to one of the passengers sitting opposite him. Mallory had almost snatched it out of the man’s hand when he saw the story on the front page.

A bizarre suicide in Holborn. A twenty-year-old criminal called Will Scott had been found dead in a street close to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The cause of death was a knife wound to the heart, which police believed to be self-inflicted. Scott had a record for aggravated burglary and assault, and was a known drug dealer. Three witnesses had seen him following a middle-aged woman, dressed in a grey suit with a silver brooch shaped like a lizard. Police were urging her to come forward.

A coincidence?

Mallory remembered the brooch Mrs Deverill had been wearing. She had arrived late to the meeting, and she might well have come through Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He felt certain she must be the woman referred to in the article, although he had no idea how she could have been involved in Will Scott’s death. But from that moment on Mallory had been worried. He had found himself thinking more and more about Matthew and he was certain that the boy shouldn’t be in her care.

Then, only a few days later, he had intercepted a routine transmission from a police station in York: something about another death, one that had been reported by a fourteen-year-old boy from the LEAF Project. It had been enough for Mallory. He had cleared a space in his diary and headed north.

Now, driving back from Lesser Malling, he was very glad he’d done it. What he had seen had been a disgrace. The boy looked ill. More than that, he looked traumatized. And Mallory had quickly noticed the welts on his arm. Well, he would soon put a stop to it. He would hand in his own report the very next day.

He checked his speedometer. He was doing exactly seventy miles an hour. He had moved into the central lane and cars were speeding past him on both sides, all of them breaking the speed limit. He watched the red tail lights blur into the distance. It was raining again, tiny drops splattering against the windscreen. Was it his imagination or had it become very cold inside the car? He turned on the heater. Air pumped out of the ventilation grilles in the dashboard, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He switched on the windscreen wipers. The road ahead shimmered and bent as the water swept over the glass.

Mallory glanced at the clock. It was half past nine. He was at least another two hours away from Ipswich – it would be midnight before he was home. He turned on the radio to listen to the news. The voices would help keep him awake.

The radio was tuned to BBC Radio 4 but there was no news. At first Mallory thought there was nothing on the radio at all and wondered if it had broken… like the heating. It really was very cold. Perhaps one of the fuses had blown. He would have to take the car into the garage when he got back. But then it came on. There was a burst of static and, behind it, something else.

A faint whispering.

Puzzled, he leant down and pressed the button that was preset to Classic FM. Mallory liked classical music. Maybe there would be a concert. But there was no music. Once again, all he could hear was the strange whispering. They were definitely the same voices. He could even make out some of the words they were saying.

“EMANY… NEVAEH… NITRA… OH… WREHTAF…”

What the hell was going on? Frantically Mallory pressed button after button, his eyes never leaving the road. It was impossible. The same voices were being transmitted on every station, louder now, more insistent. He turned the radio off. But the whispering continued. It seemed to be everywhere, all around him in the car.

The cold was more intense. It was like sitting in a fridge – or a deep freeze. Mallory decided to pull over on to the hard shoulder and stop. The rain was coming down harder. He could barely see out of the windscreen. Red lights zoomed past. Blinding white lights sped towards him.

He pressed his foot on the brake and signalled left. But the indicator had failed and the car wouldn’t slow down. Mallory was beginning to panic. He had never been afraid in his life. It wasn’t in his nature. But he was afraid now, knowing that the car was out of control. He stamped his foot down more urgently on the brake. Nothing happened. The car was picking up speed.

And then it was as if he had hit some sort of invisible ramp. He felt the tyres leave the road and the whole car rocketed into the air. His vision twisted three hundred and sixty degrees. The whispering had somehow become a great clamour that filled his consciousness.

Mallory screamed.

His car, travelling at ninety miles an hour, somersaulted over the crash barrier. The last thing Mallory saw, upside down, was a petrol tanker hurtling towards him, the driver’s face frozen in horror. The Honda hit it and disintegrated. There was a screech of tyres. An explosion. A single blare from the loudest horn in the world. Then silence.

Matt was sound asleep when the covers were torn off him and he woke up in the chill of the morning to find Mrs Deverill in a black dressing gown, looming over his bed. He looked at his watch. It was ten past six. Outside, the sky was still grey. Rain pattered against the windows. The trees bent in the wind.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“I just heard it on the radio,” Mrs Deverill said. “I thought you ought to know. I’m afraid it’s bad news, Matthew. It seems there was a multiple pile-up on the motorway last night. Six people were killed. Detective Superintendent Mallory was one of them. It’s a terrible shame. Really terrible. But it looks as if you won’t be leaving after all.”

The next few days were the worst Matt had experienced since he had arrived in Yorkshire.

Mrs Deverill worked him harder than ever and Noah never left his side. The hours passed in a tedious procession of cleaning, painting, chopping, mending and carrying. Matt was close to despair. He had tried to escape to London and he had failed. He had gone looking for clues in the wood but had found almost nothing. Two people had tried to help him and they had both died. Nobody else cared. A sort of fog had descended on his mind. He had given in. He would remain at Hive Hall until Mrs Deverill had finished with him. Maybe she planned to keep him there all his life and he would end up hollowed out and empty, like Noah, a dribbling slave.