Brook returned his eyes to the Wallis house. He moved to the door he’d last opened on the night of the murders. It was now a piece of chipboard. It had been wedged open, recently by the look of it. The gap was too slight for Brook to get through, so he forced the board further open and ducked through the enlarged gap. In the same instant, he snapped on a small torch to check the floor for scurrying rodents.
The hall was just as he remembered. No carpet now but the wallpaper was the same grimy flock. The door into the murder room was gone, taken away by forensics to eke out possible evidence from the bloody smears on the handle. There’d been no prints and no clues on the door, on anything. The carpets had eventually yielded a footprint and a shoe size, but neither Brook nor Inspector Greatorix, who’d taken over the inquiry after Brook’s suspension, had ever found a suspect or even a pair of shoes to seek a match.
Brook stepped into the room in which Mr and Mrs Wallis and their daughter Kylie had been killed. No, not killed, slaughtered like animals for the table, almost as ritual. Their throats cut from ear to ear, their life blood everywhere except their veins.
The armchairs on which the Wallis parents had died were gone, so too the once-white rug on which Kylie and her unborn child had been butchered. Even the wallpaper sporting the bloody daub ‘SAVED’ had been torn away. The room was completely bare. Brook stepped further in, wincing at the explosion of sound that his shoes created on the uncovered floorboards.
His veins turned to ice at the sight of the bottle of wine sitting on the fireplace, exactly as it had the night the Wallis family had faced The Reaper. Next to it were two wine glasses. Both were grime- and dust-free. He was expected. He forced himself to step nearer. The bottle was uncorked and full. He stared at the label. It was a Nuits St Georges, the same as it had been two years ago. Brook picked up a glass with his gloved hand and sniffed it. Clean. This time The Reaper hadn’t had a celebratory drink after doing his work. His work. The Reaper was dead. And what work was there for The Reaper in an empty house?
‘Sorenson’s dead,’ Brook muttered softly, clenching his fists.
A creaking noise from above made Brook drop the glass. It shattered at his feet. He abandoned all pretence at stealth and hurtled out of the room, bounding up the stairs three at a time and tearing into the bedroom above the living room, flashing the torch wildly to be sure he wasn’t about to be attacked. But the torch was unnecessary. There was already light. A candle in a holder burned in the corner and had been alight for some time, judging by the knot of melted wax around the stem. Brook gazed into the centre of the room at a small mattress; next to it sat a small camping stove and a few unopened tins.
Brook nodded sadly and stepped closer. How many years since he’d been in Laura Maples’s bleak squat in London? Twenty? And now here in Derby, in reproduction, it was just as he remembered it. But instead of her blackened, bloated, rat-infested corpse before him, Brook saw only the framed picture of the girl, resting on the mattress.
‘Laura,’ he said before he could stop himself. He kneeled to look at the likeness of the bright-eyed schoolgirl, staring back at him. It was the same photograph he’d used in her murder investigation in the early nineties. The one plastered over the
Well, the dreams had ceased for a while because, where Brook had failed, Victor Sorenson had found Laura’s killer and had executed his family for the offence, offering her killer up to Brook as a gift. A gift. To show Brook that The Reaper’s work, the destruction of entire families, was righteous and just.
‘Who’s doing this?’ he muttered to himself. He said it again, only louder, lifting his head to project to a nearby listener. His voice bounced around the bare room without receiving an answer. ‘Sorenson’s dead!’ he shouted this time.
He picked up the picture frame and examined it more closely. The picture was a photocopy. The necklace with its silver hearts still winked at him, but Brook was able to draw comfort from the artifice. He pulled the picture from the frame and slid it into his pocket, then listened to the house exhale around him. The pulse of the rap music throbbed faintly outside. He looked at his watch again. Ten past one. Fifty minutes to wait for The Reaper. He wasn’t coming, Brook knew that. Sorenson was dead — he’d seen it with his own eyes. But someone was pretending to be Sorenson, someone was tugging at Brook’s memories of the Maples case, and he was determined to put a stop to it. He bent down to blow out the candle and sat behind the door to wait in the dark.
The man felt the heat from the blaze in the oil drum. He looked at the teenage boys slumped on the old sofas, all four bodies contorted and unmoving. Empty cans, paper plates and glass bottles were strewn at their feet, cigarette ends littered the ground. He turned to the old car on bricks, the portable CD player on the roof, its display drawing his eye.
The man listened to the music. It was soft and beautiful, guaranteed to soothe. He wanted to close his eyes and let his mind drift, but he knew he had to stay focused. He returned to the sofas and crouched down to examine his dark shoes and black trousers by the light from the fire. They were flecked with the stains of drying blood. He stood slowly and prepared to leave.
He glanced at the blood-smeared scalpel on the ground and picked it up as carefully as he could manage with his gloved hand. He placed it on the arm of the sofa next to Jason Wallis, watching where he placed his feet to avoid brushing through more blood.
As he prepared to move away, he noticed something in the boy’s hand. He hesitated, then slid the mobile phone from Jason’s blood-spattered grasp before moving the boy’s hand to rest over the scalpel, pleased with this sudden inspiration. He squinted at the phone in the poor light. It wasn’t a model he was familiar with and it looked complicated. He thumbed at a number but his hands were clumsy in the thick black gloves so he peeled one off and dialled again.
At first the man said nothing when the voice at the other end of the line answered. He hadn’t thought what he might say. He glanced around at the four bodies, clothes saturated with blood, massive wounds deforming the throats which had once carried oxygen to now inert lungs — all except the Wallis boy, whose injuries weren’t immediately visible.
When prompted again on the phone, he answered briefly through the material of his balaclava, then threw the mobile onto Jason’s lap, deciding he had stayed longer than he should. He started to walk away but as he did so he heard a groan behind him. The man froze and turned slowly around. Jason Wallis was stirring.
The boy opened his drunken, drug-addled eyes and gawked at the man, without really taking in what he was seeing. He tried to speak but couldn’t. For a second the man fancied he saw the boy smile. He opened his mouth to try again.
‘I’m ready,’ breathed Jason and attempted to lift himself. Instead he slumped back onto the sofa, his eyes closing as he returned to the depths, oblivious to the spouts of darkening blood from his friends dotting his face and hair and soaking into his clothes.
Brook woke with a start. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. It was time. He stood to stretch his aching legs as quietly as he could, listening for any sound from downstairs. He remembered the rap music and wondered why it was no longer pulsing, so he walked over to the window. The large piece of board covering the window had a couple of improvised catches holding it in place. He loosened the bent nails to allow the board to fall into his arms and put it down before leaning out of the glass-free window to look out over the quadrangle of high fences at the back of the block of houses.
He heard the music clearly now but it had changed; it was soft and melodic. He searched his memory banks and peered into the night. There was a bonfire in an old oil drum, two or three doors away. Brook could see the glow of the dying embers crackling and fizzing in the soft breeze. To his surprise he could also see a car and what looked like a couple of old sofas positioned around the improvised brazier. He fancied he could see the heads of several people on the sofas, their feet stretched out towards the heat.
He could even see the display of a CD player as it played, could see the lights through the fog, rising and falling with each note. He listened for a second to the soft tinkling of the piano. ‘Clair de Lune’, of course. Debussy. Something beautiful. Something …
Brook stiffened. His face set he turned and walked purposefully down the stairs and out of the house.
Sorenson led the two agents towards the cabin, his hands gripped resolutely behind his back. On nearing the
