Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (28 page)

“Doctor Gable,” said the nurse. “Mr... sorry, DS Royle is here.”

The doctor looked up. He had a large, open face and a grey goatee beard. He blinked several times, smiled, and nodded. “Thanks, nurse. Please, DS Royle... won’t you come in?”

The nurse hurried away. Royle stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, unsure of what to do, and then he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.

“Sit down, please.” The doctor leaned back in his chair. He had a big belly and thin arms. His medical coat was ill-fitting, as if they hadn’t quite been able to accommodate his odd shape.

“What’s wrong with my wife?”

The doctor grabbed a pen off the desk and rolled it between his palms. “As you know, she was brought in here a few hours ago. She called an ambulance complaining of pains and they wasted no time in getting her here. A woman of her age... well, we can’t afford to take any risks.”

Royle nodded. “Go on.”

“We did an ultrasound and found something unusual.” He paused.

Royle waited for him to continue.

“There’s a growth, DS Royle. It’s attached to the wall of her womb. At first we thought it might be an underdeveloped twin. That happens sometimes, one twin is stronger than the other and the weaker one expires.”

“Twins?”

“No. Not twins. That’s just what we thought at first. I’m afraid your wife has a tumour. We can’t tell if it’s benign or malignant at this stage, but one thing’s for certain – it needs to come out. We have to operate, and we have to do it quickly."

Royle stared at the window behind the doctor’s head. The sun was almost full up; the sky was lightening by degrees, the clouds parting. “How soon can you do it?”

“You have private health care. That means we can bump her up the list and do it almost immediately – certainly in the next twenty-four hours, here at the hospital. We need to monitor the situation first, get the results of a biopsy. We’re not sure how serious this is, but I need to warn you both that it might be very serious indeed. If the tumour is malignant... well, I’m sure you understand what that might mean.” The doctor stopped playing with the pen. He placed it on the desk, then touched it a couple of times with the tip of his finger, rolling it a few inches back and forth across the surface. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “We’ll do everything we can.”

Royle stood and backed away from the desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He needed to get out of there, to get away from the hideous little man and his distracted demeanour. He couldn’t take it all in; the world was coming apart at the seams, letting in impurities from whatever lay beyond the veil. The dark seed at his centre was starting to flower.

He stumbled out of the room and back along the corridor, falling against the wall, dragging his feet along the tiled floor. He entered the ward and went straight to Vanessa’s bed, where he held her hand and stared into her eyes.

“I love you,” she said, simply and honestly.

“This is it,” he said. “This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to: you and me, in a hospital room, praying for the life of our unborn baby. Everything else is bullshit. The past cases, the crimes I could never solve, the drink, the stupid fights and arguments... none of it matters. Just this. This moment.”

She nodded, closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy, baby... take care of things while I have a little rest.”

He squeezed her hand. He knew exactly what she meant. For the first time in his life, he understood her completely. They were back together, just like he’d wanted. Every other problem in their relationship slipped away into the darkness, dwarfed by the immensity of this current situation.

Take care of things while I have a little rest...

He’d do that. He’d sort everything out; make it so that the world was ready for the arrival of their baby. Nothing else mattered.

Just then his mobile phone started to ring. He stood, glancing towards the nurse’s station, and fumbled it out of his trouser pocket. The nurse he’d spoken to earlier gave him a dark look. He shrugged, mouthed the word “sorry” and headed out of the ward, raising the phone to his ear.

“Where are you?”

It was Detective Superintendent Sillitoe, from the station.

“Sorry, sir, I’m at the hospital. It’s my wife... she’s been brought in. It’s an emergency.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know, sir, but everything’s in hand. I’m just on my way back to the station."

“Don’t bother. Stay where you are. They’re bringing her in.”

“Who?”

“Ah, yes, you don’t know... it’s Wanda.”

“Miss Wandaful?”

“Yeah. She should be there any minute. She was found on Grove Road early this morning by a jogger, in a bad way. I don’t want to say much over the phone, because you’ll need to see this one to believe it... but she’s in a really bad state.”

“Okay, I’ll head down to Casualty now. That’s where they’ll take her.”

“If she’s talking, get what you can and report back here. There’s some weird shit going down, and I have a feeling this might just be the start of it. Remember that scarecrow?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, it’s gone missing. And just to cap it off, this morning there was an identical one in the garden of each of the houses where the parents of two of those other missing girls lives... two of them: Jacobs and Warren. Royle, each of them has one of those fucked-up photographs taped to its face. It’s like some kind of twisted message. Like someone’s playing a game.”

“I’m on it, sir.”

“Let me know as soon as you know anything. It’s all kicking off at the Concrete Grove. We now have reports of gunshots on the estate. What is it with these fucking people?”

The phone went dead before Royle could respond.

Weird shit
... what exactly did Sillitoe mean by that? He thought about the scarecrows and what they might actually mean. The first one could be passed off as a silly, tasteless joke, but all of them together could only be a message. Was the person who’d taken the Gone Away Girls back in town? Did he want to resume his work, and was taunting the police in the process? And what about those gunshots? Who the hell was firing rounds in the Grove, and why?

The separate pieces of some huge plot were slowly moving together, shifting slowly, like tectonic plates. Royle suspected that he would never be able to see the full picture, only these separate sections. But hopefully that would be enough to take care of things, to rearrange into the correct order those parts of his life that were currently misaligned.

He rushed to the fire exit and down the stairs, heading for the Casualty Department. Just as he arrived there, on the ground floor at the rear of the hospital building, there was a lot of commotion. Two white-coated men were pushing a sheet-covered gurney through the reception area, followed by a nurse shouting orders. He followed them, pulling out his ID.

“Police! Who do you have there?”

The nurse turned towards him, her face slick with sweat and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She was breathing heavily. “She’s one of yours... from the lab at the station. There’s severe trauma to the lower abdomen and limbs. You really don’t want to know...”

“I’m afraid I have to know. Is she conscious?”

“Unbelievably, yes... She should be dead, but she’s managed to hang on. Fading fast, though, so if you don’t mind we need to get her prepped for immediate surgery.”

He jogged after them through the building, and waited outside when they entered an examination room. Shortly, a young doctor joined him. The man was Asian, with short hair and bushy eyebrows.

“Can you tell me anything, doctor?”

The man sighed. “She’s in a bad way. She’s lost a lot of blood and the mutilations are... well, I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s sick.”

Royle took a step closer to the man. “What do you mean? Nobody’s told me anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Shit.” The doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “She’s had the lower part of her body removed, everything severed from the waist down, and the wound cauterized by massive heat.”

Royle couldn’t understand what he was being told. He glanced at a clock on the wall but failed to register the time. Movement caught his eye over the doctor’s shoulder: a door swung open, someone scurried along the corridor clutching a bloody sheet or towel draped over some kind of container, perhaps a small bucket.

“I’m not sure what to tell you, here. This is... unbelievable. In crude terms, someone’s torn off her legs at the waist and stuffed a broom handle into the wound, making her into some kind of doll. She was found crawling along the street, dragging her shattered spine and the broom handle behind her. She should be dead, but somehow she’s still alive.”

The doctor wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Can you save her?”

The doctor looked away, staring at the wall. “I’m not sure. We’re doing all we can in there, believe me. She should be...”

“Yes, I know. She should be dead. But she isn’t.”

An hour later he was allowed into a side room, where Wanda had been put in a single bed under the window. She was wearing an oxygen mask, IV tubes were sticking out of her arms like skinned veins, and a heart rate monitor beeped by the side of the bed. Her body was covered with sheets, and there was some kind of raised chicken-wire structure encasing the lower half of her body – more specifically, the part where her legs should be.

Royle went to her and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his fingers, squeezing lightly, with all the strength that she had.

“What happened to you?”

The heart rate monitor increased in volume, the beat becoming more erratic. Wanda let go of his hand. She reached up, to her face, and removed the oxygen mask.

“No, don’t...” He tried to replace the mask, but she turned her head on the pillow. Her face was white. Not pale, but white.

“
Royle
...” Her voice was barely much more than a whisper. He could hear her pain; he knew how difficult it must be for her to speak. “
Go back... go to the Grove... something... coming... stop it... stop it and save your baby... the last... Gone Away girl... go to her family...”

Her body went limp, her mouth hung open. She was dead. She’d hung on for as long as she could, until she could see him and pass on this oblique message. He was meant to go back to the Concrete Grove, to witness whatever the hell was going on there and somehow prevent events that he could not understand.

He had no idea why this all seemed to revolve around the Gone Away Girls, but it almost made sense. In terms of his failure to solve the case, it made a lot of sense. But still it was difficult to believe that his personal obsession should make such a tangible impact on the world. There was something larger than his own despair going on here, but he was only being allowed glimpses: tiny snatches, like weak light through a broken window.

Somehow he needed to suspend his disbelief and find some faith in himself, because if Wanda was right, the life of his baby depended on what he did next.

Royle closed Wanda’s eyes with a gentle stroke of his hand across her face. “Thank you,” he said, and left the room to try and take care of things – just as his wife had asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
HE FIRST POLICE
car arrived about fifteen minutes after the shot had been fired. Then, pretty quickly, the street outside Abby’s house was cordoned off and several more vehicles arrived on the scene – three more police cars, a Black Maria van and an ambulance.

Erik watched from the bedroom window as the TV news crew set up their cameras. Some pretty blonde woman in an expensive suit delivered a to-camera update. She kept turning to indicate the house, lifting her head, tossing her hair, and Erik started to realise that he was about to be famous.

“Don’t fucking move.” He stood before Abby, grinning. She couldn’t move, of course; he’d tied her to the radiator with packing tape after he’d watched her get dressed. Then he’d gone down to the car to fetch Monty. He hadn’t made a very good job of the bindings, because he’d been in a rush, but they had held her long enough for him to get back here.

He turned and left the room, ignoring for now the ruined shrine and the motionless bastardised figure that was standing in the corner, watching in silence. He went downstairs and checked the front door again. He didn’t want anyone coming in; didn’t even want them walking up the path to the doorstep. He knelt down, lifted the letterbox, and shouted to the gathered crowd: “Anyone comes near this door and she’s dead. I’ll shoot her in the fucking face.” He wasn’t sure if he meant it, but the proximity of Monty’s mutated remains made it difficult to focus. Everything was fuzzy, as if he’d been on a day-long alcohol binge and somehow managed to drink himself almost sober.

As one of the police officers outside started speaking through a bullhorn, Erik let the flap of the letterbox drop back into place and retreated further inside the house. He went into the living room and stared at Monty, who was curled up like an ugly house pet on the sofa in front of the television. Images of Erik’s face flashed across the screen. The text beneath the photographs described him as a ‘local gangster’, a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘danger to society’. Perhaps he was all of those things; perhaps he was none of them. It didn’t matter now, because events had begun to take on a momentum of their own, and nothing he did would matter.