Paul Finch - Sacrifice

Kate quickly backed away, though both were scrawny and dirty, and pop-eyed in the unexpected light; they looked as fazed by her arrival as she was.

The one on the left wore a grubby white vest and khaki pants, a military-training-type ensemble, which somehow contrived to make him look even more emaciated than his bony frame actually was, as did his tattoos – of which he had plenty, though all looked cheap and homemade. His face was rodent-thin, his hair a greasy, ginger mat. The one against the wall wore a light blue shell-suit, though this too was ragged and exceedingly dirty. His hair was an unwashed mop. Like his mate, he had gaunt, pock-marked features, and was hollow-eyed with fear and pain.

Fearing that her lighter fuel would run out, Kate flicked it off, plunging them into blackness again. She stayed where she was, back firmly to the wall. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Where am I?’

‘I’m Carl,’ said a voice on her left; that was the guy in the khaki pants.

‘And I’m Lee,’ said another voice.

They were flat-toned, whiney. Kate was reassured that she was not in imminent danger, though she still had to struggle to contain her emotions.

‘Okay … Carl, Lee. Why are we here? What is this place?’

‘We’re underground,’ Carl said.

‘I think I realise that!’ she replied, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘Just … what’s going on?’

‘Dunno.’ That was Lee. ‘Bastard just grabbed us and chucked us down here.’

‘We don’t know why,’ Carl added. ‘We don’t know who.’

Their accents were thin, nasal. By the sounds of it, they came from Manchester, but one of the poorer districts.

‘Where are you from, Carl?’ Kate asked, sensing that he was the less beaten-down of the two.

‘Salford,’ he said, confirming her suspicion.

‘Me too,’ came Lee’s voice.

‘You were together when this happened?’

‘Never met each other before last week.’

She shuddered. ‘You’ve been in here a whole week?’

‘Seems like it,’ Carl said. ‘Difficult keeping track. Can you put your lighter on again?’

‘I’d better not. We should save it. But you think it’s been a whole week? Seriously?’

‘Could be longer.’

‘What actually happened?’

Carl hesitated before saying: ‘I was screwing cars on the Weaste.’

‘You mean stealing?’

‘Riding round in them.’ He sounded briefly defensive. ‘I always left them after. The owners got them back, or got the insurance. No one ever got hurt.’ He sniffed. ‘I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Just summat I could take for a spin, you know. Maybe whip the CD and sat-nav as well. I’d fixed on this Renault Scenic in a side-street, when this big bleeder stands up in front of me – right in front of me, like he’s been crouching down, waiting – and punches my fucking lights out. I woke up in here. Thought maybe it was his cellar, or something. Then, a couple of days later, he drops Lee down as well. It’s like he’s collecting people.’

‘Who is he?’ she asked.

‘Didn’t see him properly. Too dark.’

‘I didn’t see him either,’ Lee said. ‘I’d been doing houses up Clifton … I know that sounds bad. But I’ve got a habit, haven’t I? I’ve got to get money somehow. It’s not like I want to do it …’

‘Oh, can it for fuck’s sake!’ Carl blurted. ‘Just admit you’re a thieving little scrote. Maybe if this bastard’s listening, that’s what he’s waiting for. Maybe he’ll let us out when we finally ’fess up to all the fucking shit we cause.’

‘Did you get a look at him, Lee?’ Kate asked.

‘Nah. It was half-one in the morning. Pitch black. I’d just gone over this back wall. Next thing I know, this big fucker’s waiting on the other side. At first I thought it was a copper. I was going to go quietly – bed for the night, you know, square meal. Even if it did mean I’d be strung out in the morning …’

‘Did he say anything?’ she interrupted.

‘Nothing. Cracked my head on the bricks. Don’t remember anything after that.’

‘He wouldn’t keep feeding us if he wanted to kill us, would he?’ Carl said, sounding faintly hopeful.

‘He feeds us, does he?’ Kate didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that revelation, or even more worried.

‘Every so often he drops a few slices of bread down,’ Carl said. She heard the scrunch of wrapping paper, and pictured him licking at it, trying to mop up every minuscule crumb. ‘Couple of chocolate biscuits as well, only a couple of them mind.’

‘What do you reckon, missus?’ Lee said.

‘If he’s feeding us, it means that he wants us alive,’ Kate agreed. She didn’t bother to add: for the time being . You didn’t kidnap someone and keep them in an underground cell with no light and no running water because you had something pleasant in mind.

According to the piles of documentation they’d each been provided with, all bound in special folders and stencilled: ‘Operation Festival’, the withered corpse walled into the base of the old factory chimney had been a homeless man called Ernest Shapiro.

‘He was sixty-eight years old and so far down the pecking order that he was never even reported missing,’ Gemma told the thirty-five SCU personnel gathered in the DO.

They gazed at the big screen in fascinated silence.

‘In case you were wondering, this was done to him while he was still alive,’ she added, ‘as evidenced by the loss of tissue from his wrists where he’d attempted to wriggle free of his manacles. The cause of death was slow dehydration – in other words, thirst – which meant he’d been imprisoned in his brick coffin at least a week before the lads in Yorkshire found him.’

There was a similar astonished silence when she brought up images of the second crime; a double homicide in this case, a young male and female facing each other in the front seat of a parked motor vehicle, the female seated on the male’s lap. His head had slumped to the right, hers to the left. They were covered front and back with thickly clotted blood.

‘Todd Burling and Cheryl Mayers,’ Gemma said, ‘twenty and nineteen respectively – killed a month and a half after Shapiro, on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Believe it or not, they were transfixed together through their hearts by an arrow while having sex in Burling’s parked car.’

‘The Father Christmas victim was found on December 25?’ Shawna McCluskey asked. ‘And this happened on Valentine’s Day?’

‘Correct.’

‘Someone has a sense of humour,’ Charlie Finnegan snorted.

‘It gets funnier.’ Gemma hit her remote control and brought various images of a third murder scene to their attention. These were the most graphic so far. They portrayed an elongated, only vaguely human form, blackened almost to a crisp and lying on leaf-strewn grass. ‘This was Barry Butterfield,’ she explained. ‘Male, aged forty-three, and a registered alcoholic. His body was found last autumn, late on the evening of November 5, on the outskirts of Preston, Lancashire.’

‘Not burning on a bonfire by any chance?’ Detective Inspector Ben Kane wondered.

He was one of Gemma’s more bookish officers, a stout, bespectacled man of about forty, with neat, prematurely greying hair and a neat line in corduroy jackets, checked shirts and dickie-bows.

‘However did you guess?’ she said, hitting the remote control several times more, presenting a number of grisly close-ups.

Some fragments of clothing still adhered to the burnt carcass, but charred musculature and even bones were exposed. The face had melted beyond recognition – it resembled a wax mannequin after blowtorch treatment, yet somehow its look of horrific agony was still discernible.