The Well (27 page)

Of course, her knowledge of forensics was no better than any viewer of popular crime-scene dramas. She was sure that her efforts probably wouldn’t stand up to deeper scrutiny. But she also knew that some things were very much in her favour. First, a detailed forensic investigation would take time. Second, the rain was going to wash away most of the evidence. Third, even if she did leave any DNA, she wasn’t on the DNA database (as far as she knew). Fourth, no one had any reason to point the finger in her direction. Last, the police would be putting all of their resources into finding the children. In the scheme of things, one prank call – and possibly not the only one – wouldn’t warrant a lot of police time. She hoped.

It wasn’t easy-going underfoot. Abby stumbled several times but managed to remain upright. Going back would be harder, as she would have to be quicker. Much quicker.

She reached the telephone box. She had chosen this one not only because it could be reached from the back lanes, but also because that was the least obvious route to it. Even if the call were traced, it was unlikely that the police would approach it using the same route as she – it was just too indirect. Thankfully, the light inside wasn’t working – and, for a terrible moment, she thought that the phone itself might be out of order, but when she lifted the receiver, she heard the familiar purr. She swallowed. It was one thing sitting back and waiting, but quite another to mislead the police.

Abby pulled out the piece of paper Sammy had handed her and dialled the number, breathing hard. She was more scared than she’d ever been, but galvanised too. As much as her heart ached for the trapped girl, when the chips were down, you protect your own: Sammy, and now Helen. When she’d left them half an hour ago, the exhausted Helen was in bed, sleeping next to Sammy. She’d probably not needed the sleeping tablets, but they had pushed Helen into a deeper sleep. If she’d told Helen what she was doing, her partner would never have slept – tablets or not. Abby would tell her everything when she got back.

“Hello, Bankside incident room, can I help you?” A man’s voice.

Abby lowered her voice: enough, she hoped, to disguise it a little but not so much that it would sound false. “I have some information about the missing children.” She hoped that she wouldn’t be put on hold or transferred – every second on the line made it easier for the call to be traced.

“Could you tell me your name please?” asked the man.

Abby ignored him. “I think I saw them, tonight. Heading out of Hawksleigh, towards Manchester. With someone.”

“Could you tell me your name please, madam?” the man repeated.

“Hawksleigh, towards Manchester. I have to go.” She replaced the receiver. Then, she quickly picked it up and cleaned it before leaving it dangling.

She headed back the way she had come, as fast as she could without actually running – trying not to panic.

It seemed to take forever to reach the car. She started to panic: her sense of direction had never been especially good and the rain disorientated her. But, just when she felt sure that she’d taken the wrong route across the field, she came back onto the lane where she’d parked. She hurried back to the car.

She didn’t see any other cars until she reached Bankside and then there was nothing unusual. She hoped that the police had heard what she’d said.

1

At around daybreak, the rain finally stopped. It had slowed just after midnight – not that Becca had noticed. Exhausted beyond belief and, despite fighting the need to sleep with all of her remaining will, her body was so drained of energy that it could no longer hold on to consciousness. Balanced reasonably securely on the shoulders of Matt’s corpse, she’d slipped into a sleep so deep that not even the occasional crack of thunder could disturb her.

Early in the morning, while she slept, her temperature dropped from its dangerous heights – and her slumber deepened further. Her body knew what she needed more than she did herself: without food or water, battered by fever, rest wasn’t a luxury.

But, even in her sleep, her torment remained. A deserved release would have been a dreamless sleep; a healing coma. Instead, Becca found herself sitting, tantalisingly, at the top of the well. In her dream, the rain had stopped although the ground was still wet. The moon was high in the sky and the night was moderate – and, the luxury of it: she was dry and, if not entirely warm, at least comfortable.

She sat on the side of the well. On the opposite side sat the black bird, silent for once. At this close distance, it was far larger than it had seemed from down in the well. It regarded her with soulless eyes.

She was fixed to the ground in some way, unable to stand – and, although she was filled with fear, she now felt resigned. The end had been coming for days and now it seemed to be very close. She looked deep into the well. It was dark – too dark to see the bottom, at night as in the day – but somehow she felt that Matt was down there. Or what had once been Matt.

Then, from the ruined cottage, a dark figure walked. The silhouette was slim but curvaceous, approaching with an almost dance-like movement of the hips. As she got closer, her features became more defined. Dark, curly hair cascaded around her shoulders. Her lips were full, yet more hard than sensual. She had a strong, slightly hawk-like nose that gave her face a distinct character, and her eyes – her eyes were everything. Even in the dark, they almost glowed: large and deeply captivating, sad, insane and wise all at the same time.

She sat down close to Becca and smiled. Like the woman herself, the smile was beautiful and captivating. Part of Becca knew that she was dreaming – yet, even within the dream, she knew in her heart that what she was experiencing wasn’t entirely an illusion.

When the woman spoke, her voice was soft and measured.

“Asleep or awake, I am with you, girl.”

Becca wanted to talk but couldn’t; her mouth felt dry, her throat constricted.

“You are ready to die, aren’t you?”

Tears formed in Becca’s eyes and rolled gently down her cheeks. She wanted to shake her head in defiance but she was so, so tired. Instead, she nodded, looking at the ground. The woman extended her arm and gently lifted Becca’s chin upwards so that she looked her in the eye. Her hand was deeply cold and the dread within Becca’s heart deepened.

The woman smiled again. “Is not so easy as that. You think you can take no more. I tell you that to die now would be too easy. You will die – and it will be soon. But your death will make your pain so far seem like – like nothing. As a summer’s breeze before a winter storm.”

“Why?” sobbed Becca.

“Why not?” replied the woman. “I tell you something. You think perhaps I am dream or vision of madness. I tell you that I am more real than you. The world passes and changes and I do not. I take you and what happens? You are gone. In one hundred years no one mourns you, but I remain.”

Becca started to speak, but the woman silenced her. “Look at those around you. A selfish boy who wanted your body but not your heart. Friends you abandoned for excitement of the flesh. A father who didn’t care enough for you to hold to his vows. A mother who always thinks of you as a child. At every step, you are nothing. You will die weeping, in despair, with a heart that is empty of hope. But worse, you will be with me, tormented in ways you can’t imagine, forever. For you, there is no end to this.” She pointed towards the cottage.

In the dark, Becca could make out the shadowy outlines of perhaps a dozen people; mostly small – children like her, she realised. “Those who came to me before you,” she said, “and stay with me still.”

At the back of the group of children, Becca saw Matt. “Matt!” she shouted. His face remained impassive; expressionless. “Matt!”

“He can’t hear you,” said the woman. “He’s mine now.”

Becca wept. “No, please. He doesn’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. No one deserves this,” she said softly.

The woman stood and gestured into the well. “Deserve or not deserve, you are where you are. A place of your own making.”

Becca stood, defiant. “No! I’m not here for a reason! It’s not my fault.”

The woman laughed. Next to her tall, curvy figure, Becca felt herself once more to be the scrawny girl from which she desperately wanted to be liberated. A head shorter than the woman, possibly only just over half her weight, Becca was more conscious than ever of her immaturity.

The woman slapped her and Becca fell backwards. “You are where I want you to be.” With that, the woman dragged Becca by her hair to the open mouth of the well. Becca screamed, the pain agonising. The black bird, silent until now, cawed as if in appreciation.

The woman pushed her, hard. Becca fell headfirst, into the darkness.

2

When Julia Davis awoke she was alone and, to a certain extent, relieved. Last night, when Hannah had related the conversation with her father, Julia had decided that there was a good chance that Ed was drunk – or at least well on his way to being so. He may or may not have been working late, but he’d almost certainly decided to down a few cold ones between shifts.

When he came home drunk (which wasn’t so frequent that it happened every week, but nor was it rare), it usually went one of three ways. Most of the time, Ed would stumble into bed, fall asleep and snore the night away. Sometimes, there could be an argument, which might even escalate into a physical fight. The worst outcome was that Julia would find herself the rag-doll participant of what might charitably be called loveless sex, but could actually be almost as violent as a fight. Of the latter two options, she honestly didn’t know which was worse, but in either case her strategy was the same: she’d learned that he calmed down faster if she remained detached and non-participatory. And of course, Ed wasn’t dim: he seldom actually hit Julia and never where any bruises would show. The thought that he might have sobered up before he came home was something she welcomed.

While Hannah showered, Julia prepared her daughter’s lunchbox. Julia knew that Hannah was finding it tough and hoped that she was getting enough support from her friends – she knew that children opened up to their peers far better than they did to their parents. Julia made herself some coffee and waited for her daughter to appear.

When the phone rang, she expected it to be Ed – but it wasn’t.

“Julia, it’s Steve. Steve Carter. Is Ed there?”

It was a full couple of seconds before Julia answered – two seconds within which her mind involuntarily jumped to the most obvious conclusions. He was sobering up in a friend’s house, waking with another woman or perhaps still on a bender. Julia hadn’t reached the point where she hated her husband, but she was close. The only thing that kept them together was that he was a genuinely great father to Hannah, behaving in almost the opposite way to Hannah that he did to her: caring, gentle and thoughtful almost all of the time. Almost – Julia knew that although Hannah loved her father, she was wary of him too.

“Isn’t he with you?” asked Julia. “He called last night to say that he was working late and I’ve not seen him since. He’s not been home all night – I thought it was all hands on deck searching for Becca and Matt.”

At the other end of the line, in the Bankside police station, Stephen Carter clenched his fist.
The stupid fuck
, he thought.

“Julia,” he said, “it’s OK – I think I know where he is.” He wondered what Bankside police were going to have to cover up this time, or whether Ed would have finally outstayed his welcome.

I need to jump on this fast,
Stephen thought. He knew that he should really take another officer with him, but he had no idea what kind of mess he was going to find.

He checked the files for the address of Thomas Randle’s flat and then radioed the officers who had the first shift at the school.

“John? It’s Stephen. Has the crossing warden turned up yet?”

“Nope,” said John Coombs, who had been Bankside’s youngest police officer until Ashley had started with them. “I don’t think he’s due in yet. Any reason?”

None that you need to know,
thought Stephen. “Not really. Could you do me a favour? When he comes in, could you call me? On my mobile, though, not on the radio?”

John hesitated. “Erm – OK. Are you sure there’s no reason?”

“I’ll tell you later. And John – keep this to yourself, eh?”

Stephen Carter picked up the nearest set of car keys and signed himself out – hoping against hope that he was wrong, and that when he got to Randle’s flat all he’d see would be the old codger setting off for work.

3

Ed was a hardened enough drinker to seldom get hangovers, but when he woke that’s what he first thought the pain was.

Then it all came back to him.

He was on his side, still bound to the chair, his mouth covered by duct tape. He lay in a disturbingly large pool of his own dark, drying blood. Almost all of his body hurt, some places more than others. His mouth hurt the worst, followed pretty closely by his shoulder, chest and abdomen. When he breathed in, the pain was excruciating. Running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, he found a tooth missing. It didn’t seem to be in his mouth – he assumed that he’d swallowed it.

Shit
, he thought. He tried to look around the room but found it very hard to focus on anything. He closed one eye, then the other. The vision in his left eye was fine, but in his right was horribly blurred – although he didn’t know it yet, it was because his retina was detached.

From where he lay, he could see the front door, a blurry oblong outside the room.

He struggled to move from the chair, but was held tight. Pain flared in his left shoulder and he (rightly) suspected that it had been dislocated.

Ed had no recollection of Randle leaving, but the silence in the flat told him that he had. What he clearly remembered was Randle’s promise to him – and he strained even harder to free himself.
Old bastard,
he thought. The sure knowledge of his intent towards Hannah galvanised him. With tremendous effort and despite the awful pain, Ed tried to bounce his chair towards the front door but found that it was impossible. Each movement only slightly shifted him, barely disturbing the piles of photographs that lay beneath him, spilt from the night before. Even the smallest exertion sent bolts of pain up and down his body. After five minutes, Ed gave up, sweating and weeping.