Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

“So? I was hardly going to tackle MacKenzie empty-handed.”

I CREPT DOWN the corridor on bare feet and eased the baize door open a crack before sliding through and letting it close silently behind me. MacKenzie had turned up the volume on my computer and I could hear my own voice coming through the speakers. I knew then what he was looking at. There was no mistaking my begging tone even if the only words I could make out were a repetitive “please don’t…please don’t…please don’t…”

The sound died suddenly. “Is that you, Connie?” he said in his familiar Glaswegian accent. “I’ve been expecting you, feather. Will you show yourself to me?”

How did he know I was there? I hadn’t made a sound. I didn’t make a sound.

“You know what’ll happen if you don’t,” he warned with a grunt of amusement. “I’ll have to make do with your friend. She’s an ugly little bitch but her mouth seems to work.”

My flesh crawled in response to his voice, and it took considerable will-power to move into the open doorway. I hated the way he spoke. It was mangled vowels and glottal stops and exploded any myth that “Glesca patter” was attractive. No printed words can convey the ugliness of his accent or the effect it had on me. I associated it with his smell and his taste, and nausea flooded my mouth immediately.

He was still sitting at my desk, and Peter was where I’d seen him from outside, in the chair Jess had perched on earlier. He was fully clothed and his eyes were uncovered, but there was duct tape across his mouth, and his hands and feet were bound. MacKenzie had half-turned the chair towards the desk so that Peter could see the images that were flickering on the computer screen, and beyond them Jess, who was standing in the far corner.

I hardly looked at Peter because I was focusing all my attention on MacKenzie, but I saw the panic in his eyes before I picked out Jess at the edge of my vision. She was naked, blindfolded, gagged and bound, and balanced precariously on a footstool. I felt a lurch of panic for her because I knew how frightening that was. Unable to see, and without being able to move your hands or feet, your only point of reference is the wall behind you. If you lose contact with it, you fall. The strain of concentration is unbearable.

I’ve no idea if MacKenzie’s intention was to frighten me into complying-or if the degradation of women was irresistible for him-but Jess’s frailty shocked me. Without its normal covering of a man’s shirt and jeans, her body looked too small and childlike to take the kind of punishment that MacKenzie liked to inflict. I was aware of an object on the carpet in front of her. I couldn’t see it properly because I didn’t want to lose sight of MacKenzie for a second, but the serrated outline reminded me of one of my father’s homemade stingers.

They were short planks with nails hammered through them, and he’d used them anywhere on the farm where he found rustler or poacher tracks. His favourite trick was to bury the wooden base in the dry earth and leave the nails poking half an inch above the surface. Occasionally he caught elderly vehicles which were abandoned when their tyres burst, but the more usual result was bloody footprints in the dirt. No one died from having his feet pierced but it was an effective deterrent against stealing from my father.

Where had it come from? Had Dad made it?

I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth. “How did you find me?”

“The world’s smaller than you think.” He took note of the axe that I was holding across my chest. “Are you planning to use that, feather?”

Dad always used two-inch nails…They’d kill Jess if she fell on them… “Don’t call me that.”

MacKenzie smiled. “Answer the question, feather. Are you planning to use that?”

“Yes.”

His smiled widened. “And when I take it off you and use it on Gollum over here”-he tilted his head towards Jess-“what will the plan be then?”

“To kill you.”

I think my expression must have shown that I meant it, because he was in no hurry to move. “I persuaded your father to tell me where you were. He didn’t want to, but I gave him a choice…you or your mother. He chose your mother.” There was a glint of humour in his pale eyes. “How does that make you feel?” He pronounced “father” in almost the same way as he pronounced “feather”-“ fay-ther ”-a rasping, grating sound.

My fists tightened round the axe. “Flattered,” I said from a dry mouth. “My father has faith in me. He knows I can survive you.”

“Only if I let you.”

“Where is he? What have you done to him?”

“Taught him the facts of life. It was sad. It’s always sad when old men fight.”

“You wouldn’t have taken him on if his hands had been free. You won’t even take on a woman unless she’s bound, gagged and blindfolded.”

MacKenzie shrugged indifferently and took my father’s mobile from his pocket, turning it towards me so that I could see it. “Recognize it? Remember this? ‘All fine. Mum with me. Nothing to worry about. Call soon. Dad.’ Your text came through while I was still on the road. I thought I’d put your mind at rest by answering.” He studied my face for a reaction. “I’d have sent another one but I lost the signal when I reached the valley. Why would you want to live in a dead zone, Connie?”

I moistened my mouth again. “How do you think I sent the text? It depends which server you use.”

“Is that right? So why doesn’t this guy have a signal?” He nodded at Peter’s mobile, which was on the desk. His eyes narrowed speculatively. “You wouldn’t have come looking for me if you’d been able to call the police. Am I correct, feather?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t like that, yet how strange that it was the truth that made him uneasy. I think he wanted me to bluster and pretend, because no one in my position would admit so readily that help was unavailable. I don’t even know why I did it, since my hope had been to persuade him the police were on their way.

He darted a suspicious look at the hall behind me. “You’d better not be lying.”

“I’m not,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster. “How could I have called them without a signal? The landline’s not working. You know that.”

It was the smallest of hits-a nervous toying with my father’s mobile as he confirmed the lack of signal-but it seemed to hand me an advantage. A fear that he hadn’t read the situation as well as he believed. My difficulty was that I couldn’t see how to exploit it, as I had no idea how long he’d been in the house or what he knew, and his doubts would vanish, anyway, when the cavalry failed to appear.

“They know about you,” I said. “Your mother’s made a statement.”

He stared at me. “You’re lying.”

Was there doubt in his voice?

“If you go into my inbox, you’ll find it as an attachment to the last email from DI Alan Collins.” I could hear the clicks as my tongue rasped against my dry palate. “I remembered her name from the letter you asked me to post.”

The flicker of recognition, brief though it was, was unmistakable.

“I told Alan Collins she was called Mary MacKenzie, and had probably been…or still was…a prostitute. He passed the information to Glasgow and they found her quite easily.”

I wasn’t committing myself to much. If he denied his mother was a prostitute, or that Mary MacKenzie was her name, I’d say my information had been wrong and the police had located her another way. He didn’t. He was more interested in the axe. “You’d better not take me for an idiot, Connie. Do you think I’ll turn my back on you? It’s no matter, anyway. My bitch of a mother’s been dead to me for years. Tell me what her statement says.”