The Doll's House: DI Helen Grace 3 (12 page)

Sanderson nodded and hurried off to begin her task. Helen watched her go. She hoped she was doing the right thing trusting her, she was skating on very thin ice with Harwood already.

Helen was so engrossed in her thoughts, that she didn’t notice DC Lucas approach.

‘Good news, Ma’am.’

Helen turned, surprised by her sudden appearance.

‘Nathan Price is on the move.’

46

The van sped along the road, its tyres spitting rainwater up off the slick surface. It had been raining solidly for an hour now and the storm showed no sign of relenting. Normally Helen would have cursed such weather, but not today. It reduced driver visibility, making it easier to tail the van unnoticed.

The windscreen wipers swept back and forth, beating out the rhythm of Helen’s anxiety. Nathan Price had been driving for forty minutes with no sign of stopping. Where was he heading? He had done a couple of laps of the ring road, presumably to throw off anyone following him. If that was the purpose, he had signally failed. The three unmarked police cars were still on his tail, changing positions at intervals to avoid detection.

The van headed south now through Northam and Itchen, leaving behind prosperity and aspiration. The van was crawling along and Helen had to drop her speed to avoid giving herself away. They were in Woolston now. What had once been an affluent pre-war suburb was now a forgotten wasteland – never having recovered from the brutal bombing it sustained during the
Second World War. The rickety houses round here had been left to moulder and were inhabited now by squatters, illegal immigrants and petty criminals. It was a nasty, forgotten place.

Finally the van slowed to a stop. Helen glided past and parked up out of sight round the street corner. She was out of the car in seconds and rounded the top of the street just in time to see Price step inside a house not fifty yards away.

Helen, flanked now by DC McAndrew, hurried towards it. She could see DC Lucas and Lloyd Fortune approaching from the other direction and signalled them to hold back. She would take the lead on this one.

Gesturing to McAndrew to follow, she slipped round the side of the house, keeping below the line of the windows. The back door banged quietly in the wind. Helen hesitated, listening. Voices. She could definitely hear voices. Price’s was raised in anger, but who was the other person? Who was he talking to?

Teasing the door open, Helen slipped inside. Edging across the room to the open doorway, she could hear the voices more clearly now. Price and a young girl, who was crying and remonstrating. She seemed to have done something wrong, though Helen couldn’t tell what, as the voices had now gone quiet.

A nasty bang made Helen jump – the crying that followed making it clear that Price had struck the girl.
Helen didn’t hesitate. Pushing the door open and raising her baton, she stepped inside.

It was time to bring this game of Hide and Seek to an end.

47

Ruby screamed for all she was worth. She shrieked, whooped, ranted and raved – anything to break the awful silence that filled the small room. Her captor had only been gone a few hours but it felt like an eternity. What was he doing? How long would he punish her for? How long would she be left alone down here?

She bitterly regretted her outburst now. She had no power here, no bargaining chip, so why had she pushed him away? As she’d lain alone in the half-darkness after his departure, the minutes crawling by, the worst kind of thoughts had seized her. Thoughts of herself slowly withering to dust in this dreadful place. So she screamed to distract herself, to keep herself company in her lonely cell.

Tiring of this, she now found herself stalking the room again. It was more in hope than expectation – she had already explored her confines several times – but she had to do
something
. Passive resignation would only lead to madness or worse. She had to think. To act. To find a way out.

Clambering on to the table, she ran her fingers over the ceiling. The floorboards were wooden and could
perhaps be prised apart … But, for all her probing, they refused to budge. They had been sealed with solid silicone mastic that stubbornly resisted her attempts to remove it. It was presumably some kind of DIY soundproofing. Ruby shivered at the thought. Why did he need soundproofing down here?

Jumping down, she completed another circuit of the walls, but giving up quickly, turned her attention instead to the other items in the room. She pulled the pictures off the wall and yanked fruitlessly at the metal coat hooks. She pulled the pointless cooker and fake basin away from the wall, then, in a final fit of pique, grabbed the clock that hung above the bed and tossed it across the room. It was a flimsy children’s clock, designed to help kids learn to tell the time and it stared down at her day after day, mocking her with its idle hands, which remained resolutely locked at a quarter past twelve. It landed with a clatter on the far side of the room.

Ruby breathed out heavily. All that was left now was another assault on the door. It was solidly built with a heavy lock. There was no way she could pull it off its hinges or ram it with her shoulder. They only way to open it was to force the lock with some kind of implement. But what could she use? She would need something heavy and solid, which she could smash down on it …

Bricks. She was surrounded by bricks. The mortar had been touched up in places, but the brickwork was
probably a hundred years old or more, so … Ruby ran her hands over the cold surface of the walls, forensically searching for signs of weakness in the mortar. Round and round she went, her nails scraping at the mortar, but every brick held firm. Had her captor thought of everything? Had he left nothing to chance?

Ruby was tired now and about to give up, when she spotted one place she hadn’t tried. Pulling the bed away from the wall, she dropped to her knees to examine the brickwork that lay behind.

As she leaned down to take a closer look at the mortar, she felt a trickle of cool air brush over her face. She kept her eyes closed, revelling in it for a moment. It felt as if someone was stroking her face, like an act of kindness. It felt like a lifetime since she’d received one of those.

The air was coming through the brickwork. She dropped down on to her front and crawled closer to the wall. Sure enough, the brick was loose. Her damaged fingers protested but she jammed them into the crumbling mortar round the edges and tugged for all she was worth. To her surprise the brick came out easily.

The cavity behind it was stuffed full of paper. Confused, Ruby pulled the papers out, but was disappointed to find the cavity was shallow, hardly more than the depth of the brick itself. She pulled at the bricks next to the opening, but they refused to respond and three broken nails later, she gave up.

She was about to pick up the brick to begin her assault on the door, when her eyes alighted on one of the many pieces of paper that now littered the ground around her. On it was a drawing – crudely done in felt-tip pen – of a green tree decorated with baubles.

Curiosity now got the better of her and Ruby read the contents of the home-made card. It was an Xmas card to her mother from a girl called Roisin. In it, she wrote about how much she missed her family, how they were not to worry about her sudden disappearance and how much she was looking forward to the day when she could put this card in their hands herself. The latter section of the text was stained with tears and the card was dated a little over two and a half years ago.

Ruby dropped it like a stone and sank to the floor. In an instant, the full desperation of her situation became clear. She was not the first girl to have been abducted and held down here.

Which begged the question: what had happened to them? And where was this ‘Roisin’ now?

48

‘You’re not in trouble, Lianne. But you will be, if you don’t start talking.’

Helen was already in a dark mood and the teenage girl’s refusal to talk was only exacerbating her bad humour. When she had burst into the room to confront Nathan Price, she had found him manhandling a teenage girl. A teenage girl who was definitely
not
Ruby Sprackling.

‘You’re telling us that Nathan Price is a friend of the family.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And do friends of the family usually pop round when you’re home alone?’

Nothing in response.

‘We’ll find out either way. Your parents are coming in – if they can confirm that Nathan Price is a friend of the family –’

‘You haven’t told them, have you? About him?’ Lianne interrupted.

There was real alarm in her face now. Helen felt bad about lying, but needs must.

‘I didn’t have much choice, did I, Lianne? If you won’t talk to me …’

‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘So talk to me. I know you’re scared. I know that he hurt you.’

A livid bruise covered the girl’s right cheek.

‘But he can’t touch you here. Tell me what’s been going on and I swear he won’t come near you ever again.’

Helen held her hand out to the young girl. Lianne looked at it, then dropping her gaze to her lap, muttered.

‘I met him on Friday night.’

‘Where?’

‘Revolution.’

Sanderson shot a look at Helen, but was ignored.

‘And?’

‘He bought me drinks you know. Asked me stuff.’

‘He took an interest in you.’

‘He was nice. He had money too. So we chatted until midnight, then went off.’

‘Where, Lianne? It’s really important you tell me –’

‘We went to his van, ok?’

‘You slept with him?’

‘What do you think?’

‘How old are you, Lianne?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘How old are you?’ Helen repeated more forcefully.

‘Sixteen.’

‘Lianne …’

‘Fourteen, ok, I’m fourteen.’

The girl started to cry. Helen reached out to take her hand and this time the girl didn’t resist.

‘How long did you stay with him?’

‘A few hours.’

‘He was with you the whole time?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then what?’

‘He dropped me home.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Just after four o’clock.’

‘Just after four a.m. Are you absolutely sure?’

‘I saw the clock as I came in. I was pleased – my folks are dead to the world at that time.’

Helen concluded the interview shortly afterwards, the young girl having agreed to make a formal statement about the events of Friday night. There was some comfort in the fact that Nathan Price would face criminal proceedings – sex with a minor was a serious offence that would land him on the Sex Offenders Register – but it was of little solace to Helen. Lianne Sumner had just cleared Nathan Price of any involvement in Ruby Sprackling’s disappearance.

Like it or not, they were back to square one.

49

He tried to focus, wrenching his mind back to the tasks in hand, but still he couldn’t settle. His unpleasant exchange with Summer had left him unsettled and disturbed – it was hard to concentrate on work today. Clients came and went as usual and he dealt with them in his usual professional manner, but he was on auto-pilot, getting the job done with the minimum of effort and interaction. He just couldn’t stop thinking about her. Why was she hostile to him? It didn’t make any sense. Why was she so … ungrateful? Didn’t she understand what he’d had to go through? The risks he’d taken?

News of the discovery of a body at Carsholt beach had knocked him for six. He’d watched the local news repeatedly since, bought every edition of the local paper, scouring the reports for details. Images of a large police forensics team on site had unnerved him, as had the confirmation that local hero DI Grace would be leading the investigation. Ever since he’d seen the news, he’d been on edge, half expecting a knock on the door. He knew that this was unlikely – he’d been so careful, so meticulous in his work – but it just served to underline
the lengths he’d gone to – the sacrifices he’d made – to do right by her.

Why wouldn’t she give him the love he craved? The love he was
owed
? For the first time, anger flared in him. It could all be so perfect. It was so perfect. So why did she insist on denying him? She was an ungrateful little b—

As fast as his fury rose, he forced it back down again, striving to gain control of his raging emotions. She had behaved badly – very badly – but now was not a time to lose faith. He must be patient – there was no rush. She would come round. After all, time was on his side, not hers. One way or another, she would learn to love him again.

50

Ruby’s hands shook as she rifled through the pile of papers, digesting every horrifying word. She had read cards, letters, confessions from three women now – Roisin, a Pippa somebody and another girl who simply signed herself ‘I’. Three women who had been torn from their loved ones and dragged away to this strange Hell.

Roisin’s birthday card to her four-year-old son had made Ruby cry. She didn’t know this woman – had never met her – and yet even in spite of her own suffocating sense of terror, she had been moved by Roisin’s plight. It must have been horrific for her, lying down here alone, imagining her little boy calling for a mother who didn’t come. Did the boy think that his mother didn’t love him any more? That she had abandoned him? It was clear that Roisin had begged to be given a pen and paper, so she could write to her young son and explain her continued absence. But the cards and letters that she’d written had never reached the intended recipient. The cruelty of her captor’s actions in keeping Roisin here took Ruby’s breath away.

‘Pippa’’s testimony was in diary form. She had less to
say, she was just marking the passage of time, trying to keep herself sane by detailing the different phases of her life down here with her captor. There had been arguments, abuse and, worse still, rapprochements. Pippa had clearly hated herself for what she had to do down here, what she had become, and Ruby could see why. In the end, she had had to put Pippa’s diary down – it presented a vision of
her
future which she wasn’t strong enough to contemplate.