Waking Broken (28 page)

Friday, 9.12pm:

Harper ducked under the wire and lowered himself beneath the metal railings. He clung to the base of the fence while trying to worm his legs around and get a purchase on the other side. Part way through, he found himself stuck. He hung in mid-air, neither one side nor the other. A cold breeze plucked at him, its cool touch making him even more conscious of the river drifting by below.

He was at the eastern end of the old Kavanaugh Centre. A riverside path normally ran past the old shopping arcade but it was blocked off while the redevelopment of the site took place. From outside, it had looked easy enough to get into the site by climbing around the barrier. That, however, had been from the safety of the road. Now, as his feet scrabbled for purchase on the gravel-covered concrete on the inside and his arms felt like they were being pulled from his sockets, Harper began to realise the risk he was taking.

He gritted his teeth and cautiously shuffled his grip a bit further. Then, arching his back and twisting hard, he managed to shift more of his weight around to the inside of the railings. Another pull and he was almost there. A final twist got his body onto the path and he slid the rest of the way, landing in an undignified sprawl: arms aching but relieved to be back on solid ground.

Harper lay and gathered his breath before picking himself up. He nodded to the others. ‘Okay.’

On the other side, Brendan stepped back a few paces and threw Harper’s bag. It sailed over the fence and Harper gathered it to his chest. He slung the old pack over one shoulder. ‘Thanks.’

‘Now this one.’ Brendan held out the soft case with the video camera. It was just small enough to slip through the gap between the railings and Harper stowed it in the pack. As he did so, Rebecca reached out through the bars and took his arm. ‘You’ll be careful won’t you?’

Harper smiled and took her hand in his. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything reckless. I’m just going to keep watch. If Van Hulle turns up, first thing I’ll do is call the police. The only other thing is get him on camera.’

Rebecca looked doubtful. ‘I hope this works.’

Harper shrugged. ‘So do I. But look on the bright side: the police aren’t going to come looking for me here and if I can get some evidence they’ll have to believe me. They can arrest me then: I don’t care as long as they get Van Hulle as well.’

After leaving Van Hulle’s offices in the old church earlier that afternoon, Harper and Cash had returned to Haworth Manor, the first stage of their mission complete.

Rebecca was still there when they arrived, hard at work educating herself about her new boss. As the artist’s personal assistant, she needed to be completely familiar with his personal and professional history, output and other projects. She had not seen Harper since dropping him
off that morning — and was still unaware of the looming spectre of Van Hulle. As far as she knew, her biggest worry was thinking too much about Danny Harper and researching Paul Cash had appeared a welcome diversion.

Rebecca realised that she tended to dwell on dilemmas: over-analysing situations, rehashing actions and decisions, thinking about all the options, rather than just acting and living with the consequences. She could have spent all day considering the situation with Danny but experience had taught her she would probably emerge from the process no wiser and more confused. Instead, she lost herself in her work.

Cash had left the manor mid-afternoon, saying he was going into town but without giving any details. Rebecca did not ask for any. She was happy to wander the old mansion in solitude, getting her bearings and a feel for the place where she would be working. Later, she had gathered a pile of paperwork and settled down in front of the fire. For the next couple of hours, she skimmed through brochures for old exhibitions, magazine articles, newspaper clippings and all manner of writing relating to Paul Cash, his work and his exploits.

She had still been deep in her work when Cash returned. With him was Harper. His arrival was a surprise but her pleasure darkened when he broke the news about Van Hulle and explained the next stage of his plan for proving the man’s guilt.

‘You see,’ Harper told her. ‘I tried telling the police but now they want to bring me in for questioning. They turned up at Brendan’s flat not long after me and Paul left. They know it was me that tipped them off about Smith Street and now they think I must have more I could tell them.’

He shrugged. ‘Which, to be fair, I do; but nothing I could realistically explain. If I try telling them the truth, what are they going to think? They’re hardly going to take it on face value. Most likely thing is they section me under the Mental Health Act; that way they don’t even need to charge me. They can probably keep me locked up for as long as they like. They’re not going to believe me and they’re going to waste time trying to make sense of my story instead of going after Van Hulle.’

Rebecca was reluctant to accept Harper’s proposal. ‘But can’t you just lie low for a while, until this is over. They’ll catch Van Hulle in the end and then they’ll forget about you.’

Harper shook his head. ‘But how long’s that going to take. If they haven’t got any evidence they’re not going to be able to do anything. As far as I know, they haven’t even found a body. There’s no proof a crime has even been committed. There’s no way of knowing that Van Hulle will ever get caught. And how long would you be prepared to wait? And what if something happens to some other woman while I’m in hiding waiting for him to make a mistake?’

Harper paced around the room while he talked to Rebecca, with Cash standing in the doorway. ‘Look,’ Harper continued passionately. ‘We don’t even know what he does with the women he takes. Or how many there are, or who they are. The only one I know about is Stacey Cole. She was the one imprisoned in the wall. The thing is…’

He stopped and turned to face Rebecca. ‘When the police found her body they couldn’t say how she died. She might have been still alive when she was put there. They said Van Hulle didn’t kill her. That she might have drowned when the concrete was poured on top of her.’

Harper let that revelation sink in as he stared into Rebecca’s eyes. ‘Maybe he doesn’t even kill the women himself. In which case, what if he’s got a prisoner somewhere now, someone he’s going to put into that wall? If I don’t stop him, that woman’s as good as dead. But, if I can stop him, she’s got a chance.’

Now, some hours later, Harper found himself picking his way through the shadows of a sprawling building site. The bag over his shoulder held the video camera and his mobile phone, as well as an extra fleece, a flask of coffee and a pack of sandwiches. He was wearing his warmest clothes and ready for a long night ahead.

He carried a torch in one hand but kept it off as much as possible, just in case of any security guards on the site. Instead he relied on the city’s ambient light: a steady orange glow reflected off the ceiling of low clouds.

The riverside path only took him part way into the site. Then it came to an abrupt end, terminating where foundations were being installed for the office blocks destined to sit here. Harper was forced to detour into the main site, threading his way around stacks of reinforcing rods, parked machinery and service trenches still open to the night sky. He moved warily, as anxious not to make noise as to avoid falling into any excavations.

Eventually, he found his way to the edge of the huge pit that would one day be an underground car park. Harper gave a shiver as he looked into the hole. Like so many others, he had seen the TV pictures and photographs from when the wall breached and the river burst through. And he had also seen the snatched, long lens shots taken after the water was pumped out again and the breach revealed. He had seen the police forensic teams chipping away at the concrete and combing the mud for clues. He had also seen the footage of the bagged remains being removed from the scene and taken away for autopsy.

The hair on his neck stood up as he saw the scene again. This time he was closer to the pit and seeing it from a new angle. And this time, the wall was still unbreached, the hole unflooded and the body undiscovered.

Harper drew a slow breath and looked around, almost expecting Van Hulle to explode at him out of the shadows.

But nothing happened. He could hear traffic and distant voices from outside the site, in the direction of the city centre. Here, though, all was still.

He began to edge around the excavation. The section of retaining wall around the inside of the pit was already finished and in place. But to the left, where the builders had cut deep into the riverbank, the wall was incomplete. Where the riverbank was cut away, a temporary barrier held the water back. Inside that, a skin of plywood shuttering and a grid of metal rods marked out the position of the wall.

Enough of the bank still remained, however, to provide a rough path around the top of the wall. Tramped down by builders’ boots it was relatively level and firm. Harper followed it slowly. He flicked the torch on but kept the bulb hooded by his hand. As he made his way along parallel with the wall, he shone the beam down into the open grid of metal, looking for any kind of opening where a body might be deposited.

Friday, 10.13pm:

The male nurse on the reception desk at the hospital’s accident and emergency department was used to seeing all sorts. Few people included a visit to A&E in their Friday night plans but plenty added the venue to their schedule at the last minute. Some had already lost consciousness by the time they reached hospital but most came in as walking wounded: arriving in all manner of condition.

Often though, it would be the attitude that was as problematic as the injury that brought them. Some would be in deepest despair, in all shades of pain from non-existent to excruciating, some full of anger at the indignity of whatever had been inflicted on them — even when both cause and effect were self-inflicted. The most problematic customers were those who arrived still wanting to party and needing careful persuasion to bring them down from whatever plateau of pleasure they had reached.

This Friday had been little different from any other. When the outer doors were pushed open for the tenth time in less minutes, the nurse did not bother to look up from the holiday form in front of him. He had been trying to complete it since coming on shift more than two hours ago and had barely got past filling in his own name.

It was the sharp intake of breath from the orderly standing next to him that got his attention. The nurse’s eyes opened wide as he took in the woman staggering towards him and the child lying limp in her arms.

Louise knew she stank. She only realised when, just minutes after picking her up, the taxi driver she flagged down wound his window down while driving at racetrack speed through the February night.

But her own condition was less important to her now than that of the boy in her arms. He did little more than mumble even while she was hauling him through the hatch in the cell roof. He had stayed unconscious since and she could feel the fever burning up his body. Without expert intervention, she knew his time was limited.

After escaping from the cell, Louise wasted little time but it still took her more than an hour to get out of the Caledonia Barracks. Once she finally pulled herself up into the stairwell, she had soon found the extending stepladder used by her captor.

There were no bulbs in either of the lights in the stairwell but those in the workshops above worked fine. The illumination they provided was plenty to let her see while she unfolded the aluminium steps and lowered them down into the cell. When she bent down to pick up Ahmad, the boy lay in her arms like a limp sack. Although her own strength was flagging, there seemed hardly any substance to him and lifting him was easier than she had feared. In the end, she put him over her shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried him up the ladder. It was a tight fit getting the two of them through the hatch; she was torn between trying to avoid hurting the boy by scraping his broken limbs against the opening and a sudden, burgeoning fear her captor might return.

The swift rising of panic was insidious. One moment she was concentrating grimly on the task in hand. Then she felt her legs starting to weaken on the ladder and a cold crawling sensation in her gut. She could almost hear him coming, sense his figure about to appear in the doorway above. For a second, it was all she could do not to let go and slide back down the ladder into the cell. But she literally bit back the fear, inadvertently sinking her teeth into her bottom lip.

The sudden metallic taste of her own blood registered before the pain of what she was doing to herself. It was enough, though, to break her out of the will-sapping funk that risked putting them both back on the cell floor.

A few minutes later, Louise was outside the warehouse, shivering as her skin met the night air. She paused as she emerged, staring around with a sense of dislocation; although dark, it was the first time she had seen the sky in three days. While looking around, she saw the red van and dimly recognised it as the vehicle that had brought her there. Overcoming a shiver of distaste, she spent a few moments checking the van but it was locked and there were no keys obvious.

From there, it was a slow walk through the barracks to find the exit. To begin with, she had no idea which way to go. Then, casting around, she spotted the river and decided the logical route must be away from it. There was no obvious path but she picked her way through the buildings, across a parade ground. Finally, she found the extensive lawns that divided the base itself from the perimeter fence.

Lit only by the glow cast by the streetlights on the far side of the fence, the small dark shapes that hopped across the orange grass confused her at first. It took nearly a minute before she recognised the things as night-grazing rabbits.

With Ahmad clutched in her arms, she reached the gates of the old barracks a few minutes later. Only then did the next problem dawn on her; how to get out of a base designed to be secure against intruders. The gates stood about eight feet high, while the fences were even higher. Her hopes collapsed briefly at that point and Louise spent some minutes standing at the fence screaming at the outside world. But there were no pedestrians about and the entrance to the barracks lay too far back from the main road for anyone to see her.

In the end, she left Ahmad against the lee of a guardhouse wall and went all the way back for the stepladders. Exhaustion, both in mind and body, was setting in by the time she got them both sitting on top of the gates. Wavering on the thin metal barrier, she nearly fell. Somehow, though, she managed to keep holding on to the gates, the boy and the steps as she pulled their ladder up from inside and lowered it down again on the other side.

Louise was tottering like a drunk by the time she reached the edge of the busy main road heading into the city centre from the direction of the airport. The first cars rushed past without slowing but then a Toyota hatchback flashed its lights. For a moment, Louise thought the car was going to continue just like the others but then it braked sharply and veered to the edge of the road. Turning slowly, holding Ahmad to her with one arm, she raised a weary hand in supplication. Seconds later, the car’s reversing lights came on. The Toyota shot back towards them, causing angry hoots from other drivers unaware of what they were passing, only seeing a danger to their own safe journey.

The car turned out to be a taxi but the driver, a young Pakistani, did not even ask about a fare as he gently helped Louise into his car and laid Ahmad across her lap. ‘I take you hospital straight away,’ he said. ‘Is quicker than ambulance.’

With that, the man put on his hazard lights, sounded his horn and accelerated off like a horde of demons were on his tail. He asked no questions, concentrating on driving as fast as he could, only distracted from his mission for a moment when his nostrils registered the smell coming from the back seat of his car.

Now, as Louise almost fell into the arms of the hospital orderly, the taxi driver bustled in beside her. Desperate to make himself useful, he slammed his fist on the reception counter. ‘This woman and her boy need help,’ the man declared, as the nurse dropped his holiday form and came rushing around to the aid of Louise and Ahmad.