The Chemistry of Death (31 page)

'Hitting reporters might not be the best idea you've had.'

'Who said I hit them? I just escorted them off my property, that's all.' A shadow clouded his face. 'Look, I'm sorry about Jenny.' He sighed. 'Sorry. Shit, that doesn't come close, does it?'

I wasn't ready to acknowledge condolences. 'What time did the police release you?'

'Two or three hours ago.'

'Why?'

'Why what?'

'Why did they let you go?'

He eyed me over his glass. 'Because I didn't have anything to do with it.'

'So why are you sitting here getting drunk?'

'You ever been taken in for questioning for murder?' He gave a laugh. ' "Questioning" -- there's a fucking joke. They don't question, they tell. "We know you were there, your car was seen, where did you take her, what have you done with her?" Not much fun, I can tell you. Even when they let you go they act like they're doing you a favour.'

He raised his glass in a mocking salute. 'And then you're a free man again. Except you know people are going to be looking at you and thinking, "No smoke without fire," and how they never trusted you anyway.'

'But you didn't have anything to do with it.'

I saw the muscles in his jaw bunch, but when he spoke his voice was still calm. 'No, I didn't have anything to do with it. Or what happened to the others, either.'

I'd not intended to interrogate him, but now I was here I couldn't seem to help it. He sighed and shrugged, easing the tension.

'It was a mistake. Someone told the police they'd seen my car outside Jenny's house. But they couldn't have.'

'If you could prove you hadn't been there why didn't you do it straight away? Why make it look like you were hiding something, for Christ's sake?'

He took another drink. 'Because I was. Just not what they thought.'

'Whatever it was, I hope it was important.' I couldn't keep the anger from my voice. 'Jesus, Ben, the police wasted hours with you!'

His mouth tightened, but he accepted the rebuke. 'I've been seeing a woman. No-one you know. She lives ... well, she doesn't live in the village. I was with her.'

I guessed the rest. 'She's married.'

'At the moment. Though now her husband's had the police calling at their house to ask if his wife can verify she was in bed with me, I'm not sure she will be for much longer.'

I didn't say anything.

'I know, I know. I should have told the police earlier,' he burst out. 'Shit, I wish to Christ I had. I could have saved myself hours of fucking grief, and not be sitting here now wishing I'd done things differently. But when you get dragged out of the house and stuck in a police cell, things like that don't always occur to you at the time, you know?'

He rubbed his face, looking drawn. 'All because someone made a fucking mistake about seeing my car.'

'It wasn't a mistake. It was Carl Brenner.'

Ben looked at me sharply, a speculative light in his eye. 'I must be getting old,' he said after a moment. 'Shit, I never even thought about him.'

We were both moving away from the near-confrontation, tacitly accepting the stress talking on both sides. 'I went out to the house. Brenner wouldn't admit it, but I'd swear it was him.'

'He's not the sort to admit anything. But I appreciate your trying.'

'It wasn't just for you. I wanted the police to be out looking for Jenny, not sidetracked down a dead end.'

'Fair enough.' He considered his glass, then set it down without taking a drink. 'So what else did your inspector friend tell you?'

'That you used to have a relationship with Sally Palmer. And that you assaulted a woman fifteen years ago.'

He gave a sour laugh. 'It all comes back at you, doesn't it? Yeah, Sally and me got together a while back. No big secret, but we didn't advertise it. Not in a village like this. But it was nothing serious. Didn't last long, we stayed friendly afterwards. End of story. The other... well, let's say it was a youthful mistake.'

He must have read my expression. 'Before you get the wrong idea, I didn't assault anybody. I was eighteen and I'd started seeing a woman a good bit older than me. A married woman.'

'Again.'

'I know, it's a bad habit. I'm not proud of it. But at the time I thought it was a case of no-one missing a slice off a cut loaf, you know? I was young, I thought I was God's gift. Then when I wanted to end it, it got a bit ugly. She threatened me, we had a row. Next thing I knew she'd reported me for attempted rape.'

He gave a shrug. 'She withdrew the charges, eventually. But mud sticks, doesn't it? And in case you're wondering why you didn't know any of this, I don't broadcast my private life, and I don't apologize for it either.'

'I didn't ask you to.'

'OK, then.' He straightened, threw the rest of his whisky onto the grass. 'So that's it. My dark secrets. Now I can think about what I'm going to do to that bastard Brenner.'

'You're not going to do anything.'

He gave me a slow, dangerous smile that showed the effects of the whisky. 'I wouldn't put money on that.'

'If you go after him it's only going to muddy the water even more. There's more at stake here than some vendetta.'

Colour was mounting in his face. 'You expect me to just forget about it?'

'For now, yes. Afterwards...' The thought of what 'afterwards' might mean was like a blow to my stomach. 'When they've caught whoever took Jenny, you can do what you like.'

The heat went out of him. 'You're right. I wasn't thinking. Be something to look forward to, I suppose.' He looked thoughtful. 'Don't think this is just the grudge talking, but have you thought about why Brenner might have told the police he'd seen me at Jenny's?'

'You mean apart from getting you arrested?'

'I mean he might have had more than one reason. Like covering himself.'

'That crossed my mind, yes. But you're not the only one with an alibi. Mackenzie said he'd already checked him out.'

Ben studied his empty glass. 'Did he happen to say what his alibi was?'

I tried to remember. 'No.'

'Well, a pound will get you a penny it was his family who vouched for him. They're all as thick as bloody thieves. That's one reason we've never been able to get him for poaching. That and the fact he's a canny bastard.'

My heart had started beating faster as he spoke. Brenner was a hunter, a poacher known to be aggressive and antisocial. Given the killer's track record for trapping and mutilating animals as well as women, Brenner seemed an obvious match for the profile. Mackenzie was no idiot, but faced with neither evidence nor motive there was no reason for him to suspect Brenner above anyone else.

Not as long as he had an alibi.

I realized Ben had said something, but I'd no idea what. My mind was already racing ahead.

'What time is Brenner likely to go out hunting?' I asked.

Jenny had lost any sense of time. The fevered shaking that had gripped her after she'd finally been left alone had almost stopped. But what was more worrying was how sleepy she was starting to feel. It wasn't a normal tiredness. She had no idea how long she had been down here, but it must have been long enough for her to have missed two, perhaps three of her insulin injections. Now her blood sugar was starting to escalate out of control, and shock was making it worse.

Shock and blood loss.

In the darkness she had no way of gauging how much blood she'd actually lost. Most of the cuts had eventually crusted themselves shut, except the last one. The worst. The bloodied rag that had been her T-shirt was wrapped around her right foot. The cloth had a sticky feel to it now. A good sign, she hoped. It meant the wound wasn't bleeding so heavily any more. But it still hurt. God, it hurt.

It had happened after she'd taken off the filthy wedding dress. As the music box had faltered into silence for a third time, Jenny had stopped too. She had swayed, dizzily, barely able to stay on her feet any longer. She sank to the ground, still wearing the bloodstained dress. She struggled to stay awake, but blackness slowly stole over her vision. She was dimly aware of movement around her, but it seemed increasingly distant. Time passed; then she'd felt herself being prodded roughly.

When she opened her eyes the first thing she saw was the knife.

She raised her head to look up at the man holding it. There was no reason not to any more. She knew now she wasn't going to get out of here alive, whether she could identify him or not.

Even so, she felt her stomach coil as she stared into his face and saw that knowledge confirmed.

He prodded her again with his foot.

'Take it off.'

Using the wall for balance, she rose unsteadily to her feet and fumbled the wedding dress over her head. He snatched it away and stood in front of her. She kept her head bowed, feeling him staring at her nakedness. Her heart thumped painfully. She could smell him, feel his breath on her flesh as he moved closer.
Oh, God, what's he going to do?
She couldn't keep her eyes from the knife he held at his side, willing him to set it down.
Just once. Just one chance, that's all I ask.
But he didn't. Slowly, he raised it, letting her see the blade before moving it towards her. She flinched as it pricked her arm.

'Keep still.'

She forced herself to stay immobile. The knife moved over her, pricking her flesh with its tip. Each time a pinpoint of blood would appear, a dark red bead that would swell before trickling down her skin. It hurt, but the anticipation was even worse. She could feel his breathing growing faster, smell the excitement radiating off him like heat. He shuffled even closer. Jenny gave an involuntary gasp and jerked back as one of his boots came down on her toes, and with that the floodgate opened to her panic.

'Get off me!' she yelled, lunging away blindly, forgetting about the rope around her ankle. It pulled her up short, yanking her leg so that she fell heavily. She twisted around as he stood over her. The look in his eyes sent a chill through her. There was nothing human in them, nothing sane.

'I told you to keep still.' His voice was terrifyingly calm. He reached down and took hold of her untethered foot. 'You shouldn't try to run away. I can't let you do that.'

'No! No, I wasn't...'

He wasn't listening. He was stroking her foot with the knife. His expression was rapt as he touched her big toe with the blade.

'This little piggy went to market.' His voice was soft, almost sing-song. He went onto the next toe. 'This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef.'

Onto the third, then the fourth.

'This little piggy had none. And this little piggy...'

Jenny realized what was going to happen an instant before it did. White heat lanced up from her foot as the knife suddenly jerked. She screamed, trying to pull her foot away. He held on to it, watching her thrash and struggle, then let it drop. The severed toe lay like a bloodied pebble on the ground.

'This little piggy didn't try to run away any more.'

As he'd stood over her, knife blade dulled with her blood, she'd thought he was going to finish it. She wanted to plead with him, but some stubbornness held her back. Now she was proud of that much, at least. And she knew it would have done no good anyway. He would only have enjoyed it.

He'd left her then, dragging the planks back into place to shut her in the dark once more. She'd no idea how long ago that was. It could have been hours, minutes, even days. The agony in her foot had settled into a hot, bone-deep throb, and her throat was so dry it felt as though shards of glass were embedded in it. Yet it was becoming more of a struggle than ever for her to remain awake. She'd tried to work again on the rope around her ankle, but the effort was too much. In the darkness she couldn't tell if her vision was blurring, but she knew she was becoming hyperglycaemic, her blood sugar now dangerously high. And without insulin it was only going to get worse.

Assuming she lived long enough.

Jenny wondered why she hadn't been raped. The lust and hate had been obvious, but for some reason the assault hadn't come. Even so, she didn't delude herself. She thought about the face she'd glimpsed in the glare of the match. There was no mercy, no hope for her there. And she was all too aware that she wasn't the first woman to be brought down here. The cuts, the dress, the dancing -- they seemed almost part of some incomprehensible ritual.

One way or another, she knew she wouldn't survive it.

It was late afternoon when I reached the Brenner house. There was a haziness to the day, a faint misting of clouds beginning to encroach across the previously pure blue of the sky. I stopped at the bottom of the track, looking at the ramshackle building. It seemed even more run-down than I remembered. There was no sign of life. I watched for a moment or two longer, until I realized I was putting off what I'd come here for. Shifting the Land Rover into drive, I slowly bumped up the uneven track.

Once I'd decided what I was going to try to do, the hardest part was being patient. Every instinct in me had cried out to act straight away, to drive out to the house immediately. But I knew that any chance of success depended on Brenner not being home. Ben had suggested waiting till later, when the odds were he would either have gone to the Lamb or be out hunting. 'He's a poacher. He'll be busy either early morning or late at night. That'd be why he was still in bed when you called earlier. He'd probably been out working his snares till after dawn.'

But I couldn't stand the thought of waiting that long. Each hour that passed reduced the chances of finding Jenny alive. In the end I hit on a ridiculously obvious solution: I simply called the Brenner house and, without identifying myself, asked if Carl was in. The first time his mother answered. When she told me to wait and went to get him I hung up.

'What will you do if their phone stored your number and he calls back?' Ben asked.

'It doesn't really matter. I can say I want to talk to him. I can't see him agreeing to that anyway.'

But Brenner hadn't called back. I left it a while, then called again. This time it was Scott who answered. No, Carl was out, he told me. He'd no idea when he'd be back. I thanked him and broke the connection.