S. Bolton - Dead Scared

The sharp sideways glance sent a spasm of pain through Joesbury’s head.

‘Your car was ambushed less than an hour after you turned up at college claiming to be related to Flint,’ said George. ‘Who else saw you together?’

‘Jesus, she’s just a kid.’

‘She’s twenty-six, Sir, older than she looks. And she wasn’t born Talaith Robinson, either. She was born Talaith Thomas. Robinson was her stepfather’s name. Her own father blew his brains out when she was three. She and her elder brother, the Iestyn Thomas you asked us to trace, found the body.’

‘You’re going to have to tell me about Lacey sometime,’ said Joesbury, and her name seemed to cling to the inside of his mouth.

George took his eyes off the road for the first time. ‘Her car’s still parked in the Backs,’ he replied. ‘No sign of her anywhere in college, but her car keys and bag are in her room.’

The traffic lights in front of them changed to amber. George pressed the accelerator and the car shot through as they flashed to red.

‘No one’s seen her since this morning,’ George continued, turning the corner and picking up speed. A wave of nausea washed over Joesbury. He closed his eyes, opened them and focused on the night sky rather than the headlights speeding towards them. The moon was low and a pale orange, almost full.

‘She wasn’t well, according to a couple of the girls on her corridor,’ said George. ‘About half past nine, a doctor turned up at her door – off her own bat, as far as we can judge, nobody called her – and they had to wake Lacey up. The doctor was young and female, in a wheelchair, so we can assume it was Evi Oliver. They both went over to the Buttery for breakfast and we lose track of them after that. Dr Oliver hasn’t been seen at the clinic she works at, or in her college rooms. Her colleagues have been trying to contact her all day and she isn’t answering the door at her house.’

Joesbury’s brain felt like an engine in need of a major overhaul. He wasn’t taking this in fast enough.

‘DC Flint and Dr Oliver could be together,’ continued George. ‘Hiding out somewhere.’

‘Lacey’s with Bell,’ said Joesbury. ‘We need to get into that farm. Where’s your phone?’

‘In the glove compartment, if you must, Sir. But with respect, if she is in there and we go in half-cocked, we could put her in more danger. DCI Phillips has requested hostage liaison.’

Detective Constable Richards of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary was sitting in his unmarked police car outside Evi’s house. He’d been there for forty minutes when the roar of a motor-bike engine startled him out of the daydream he’d been having about a recent skiing holiday, a chalet maid from Blackburn and a Jacuzzi in the snow. The large performance bike pulled up behind his car and he watched in his rear mirror as the rider switched off his headlight, climbed off and marched up the path. He was hammering on the door before Richards was out of his vehicle.

THERE ARE TIMES when just waking up can feel like the hardest thing anyone could ever ask you to do. The first morning after your child has died, perhaps. Or after the man you adore has walked out. You would give anything, certainly the rest of your life, to stay down in the darkness of not knowing.

It never happens, though, does it? You always come back to yourself. The world is still there. You are still there. But death has taken root inside you and you know it will grow, like a cancer with a voice, from now until the day it consumes you whole.

I took a deep breath, just to check I still could. I was in pain, they’d been pretty rough, but it wasn’t too bad. Through my eyelashes, I could see the outline of my room at St John’s. There was light. I was hot and wet and sticky, and that would be sweat. The drugs they’d given me had worn off and now absolute clarity like silver light was flooding through my head.

I could not be in St John’s, I knew too much. They couldn’t risk sending me back. I was still in Unit 33, in the replica of my room they’d mocked up, and it was where I would stay. I would not survive to tell anyone what they’d done to me. Sometime in the next few hours they would kill me and I would never tell anyone about the hour I’d spent in the woods behind this building. If I were lucky, I might not have time to relive it for myself.

I opened my eyes, saw the whitewashed ceiling. My real ceiling at St John’s had been Artexed.

Perhaps they would let me write a letter, as long as it seemed like a real suicide note. I could do what I’d thought I’d never be able to. I could tell Joesbury what he meant to me. Dear Mark, I’d write, and the name would feel so unfamiliar, so separate from the man in my head. Dear Mark, and then I’d probably leave it at that, because what I felt for that man I could never put into words and it would have to be enough that the very last thought in my head had been of him.

The room was cold and the sweat on my body cooling down, starting to itch. Instinctively, my hand went down to my stomach. I touched something solid, slick and wet. A split second later I was sitting up, staring at the mass of bloody tissue in my hands. My whole body was covered in blood. I could hardly see my skin, and strewn around me, around the bed, were organs, intestines, bodily tissue, a heart, even what looked like lungs. They’d hacked me open and pulled out my insides and left me, still alive, to see what they’d done.

I hit the floor hard and it was cold beneath me. There was a keening noise in the room that could only have been me but it seemed to be coming out of the walls. Right by my blood-slicked left foot was a triangular piece of tissue that I knew was my own uterus and a long-handled, steel-bladed, gleaming sharp knife.

End it now .

I think I might have spoken out loud, the thought was so clear.

A bit more pain – you’ve gone through so much already, what difference can a few seconds more make – and it’s over. They can never hurt you again, you’ll never have to think about what they did to you. You know you can do it, you did it once before, you held a knife in your hand and you held out your wrist and …

… the knife was in my hand. I was on my knees, shivering with cold, or maybe shock, and the knife handle felt warm and smooth in my palm. Five letters had been etched crudely into the blade. LACEY. My knife.

A moment’s courage and it’s done. Deep breath now .

A thought. A tiny, half-hearted protest, barely able to make itself heard. If I’d been ripped open, why wasn’t I in agony?

I was staring down at the scar on my left wrist. I remembered the white-hot searing pain of the moment when flesh parted and blood burst out, I remembered the screams ringing in my ears.

You can do it again. You won’t even feel it, your body’s already full of sedatives and anaesthetic, the cut will be little more than a tickle, a mother’s kiss, sending you sweetly to sleep .

My arm was outstretched, my palm facing upwards like an offering, the knife handle felt like an old friend, and I was ready.

And yet, like a late-night knock on the door, there was that nagging thought struggling for attention. If I could feel the floor beneath me, cold and hard, and the wood of the knife handle, and the wet stickiness of the gore covering me, why couldn’t I feel any pain?

Do it! It’s over. Your life was nothing anyway. Has there been a single day that wasn’t cold and heavy and lonely? Who will even know you’ve gone ?

Could a sedative take away pain yet leave other sensations? Somehow I didn’t think so. I made myself look properly at my mutilated body for the first time. What I saw gave me the courage to touch.