and limbs. You really don’t want to know…”
“I’m afraid I have to know. Is she conscious?”
“Unbelievably, yes… She should be dead, but she’s managed to hang on. Fading fast, though, so if you don’t mind we need to get her prepped for immediate surgery.”
He jogged after them through the building, and waited outside when they entered an examination room. Shortly, a young doctor joined him. The man was Asian, with short hair and bushy eyebrows.
“Can you tell me anything, doctor?”
The man sighed. “She’s in a bad way. She’s lost a lot of blood and the mutilations are… well, I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s sick.”
Royle took a step closer to the man. “What do you mean? Nobody’s told me anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Shit.” The doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “She’s had the lower part of her body removed, everything severed from the waist down, and the wound cauterized by massive heat.”
Royle couldn’t understand what he was being told. He glanced at a clock on the wall but failed to register the time. Movement caught his eye over the doctor’s shoulder: a door swung open, someone scurried along the corridor clutching a bloody sheet or towel draped over some kind of container, perhaps a small bucket.
“I’m not sure what to tell you, here. This is… unbelievable. In crude terms, someone’s torn off her legs at the waist and stuffed a broom handle into the wound, making her into some kind of doll. She was found crawling along the street, dragging her shattered spine and the broom handle behind her. She should be dead, but somehow she’s still alive.”
The doctor wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Can you save her?”
The doctor looked away, staring at the wall. “I’m not sure. We’re doing all we can in there, believe me. She should be…”
“Yes, I know. She should be dead. But she isn’t.”
An hour later he was allowed into a side room, where Wanda had been put in a single bed under the window. She was wearing an oxygen mask, IV tubes were sticking out of her arms like skinned veins, and a heart rate monitor beeped by the side of the bed. Her body was covered with sheets, and there was some kind of raised chicken-wire structure encasing the lower half of her body — more specifically, the part where her legs should be.
Royle went to her and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his fingers, squeezing lightly, with all the strength that she had.
“What happened to you?”
The heart rate monitor increased in volume, the beat becoming more erratic. Wanda let go of his hand. She reached up, to her face, and removed the oxygen mask.
“No, don’t…” He tried to replace the mask, but she turned her head on the pillow. Her face was white. Not pale, but white.
“
Her body went limp, her mouth hung open. She was dead. She’d hung on for as long as she could, until she could see him and pass on this oblique message. He was meant to go back to the Concrete Grove, to witness whatever the hell was going on there and somehow prevent events that he could not understand.
He had no idea why this all seemed to revolve around the Gone Away Girls, but it almost made sense. In terms of his failure to solve the case, it made a lot of sense. But still it was difficult to believe that his personal obsession should make such a tangible impact on the world. There was something larger than his own despair going on here, but he was only being allowed glimpses: tiny snatches, like weak light through a broken window.
Somehow he needed to suspend his disbelief and find some faith in himself, because if Wanda was right, the life of his baby depended on what he did next.
Royle closed Wanda’s eyes with a gentle stroke of his hand across her face. “Thank you,” he said, and left the room to try and take care of things — just as his wife had asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE FIRST POLICE car arrived about fifteen minutes after the shot had been fired. Then, pretty quickly, the street outside Abby’s house was cordoned off and several more vehicles arrived on the scene — three more police cars, a Black Maria van and an ambulance.
Erik watched from the bedroom window as the TV news crew set up their cameras. Some pretty blonde woman in an expensive suit delivered a to-camera update. She kept turning to indicate the house, lifting her head, tossing her hair, and Erik started to realise that he was about to be famous.
“Don’t fucking move.” He stood before Abby, grinning. She couldn’t move, of course; he’d tied her to the radiator with packing tape after he’d watched her get dressed. Then he’d gone down to the car to fetch Monty. He hadn’t made a very good job of the bindings, because he’d been in a rush, but they had held her long enough for him to get back here.
He turned and left the room, ignoring for now the ruined shrine and the motionless bastardised figure that was standing in the corner, watching in silence. He went downstairs and checked the front door again. He didn’t want anyone coming in; didn’t even want them walking up the path to the doorstep. He knelt down, lifted the letterbox, and shouted to the gathered crowd: “Anyone comes near this door and she’s dead. I’ll shoot her in the fucking face.” He wasn’t sure if he meant it, but the proximity of Monty’s mutated remains made it difficult to focus. Everything was fuzzy, as if he’d been on a day-long alcohol binge and somehow managed to drink himself almost sober.
As one of the police officers outside started speaking through a bullhorn, Erik let the flap of the letterbox drop back into place and retreated further inside the house. He went into the living room and stared at Monty, who was curled up like an ugly house pet on the sofa in front of the television. Images of Erik’s face flashed across the screen. The text beneath the photographs described him as a ‘local gangster’, a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘danger to society’. Perhaps he was all of those things; perhaps he was none of them. It didn’t matter now, because events had begun to take on a momentum of their own, and nothing he did would matter.
“Is this what you wanted, Monty?”
“What do we do next?”
Monty slithered off the sofa and across the floor, like a snake with a human face.
Even now, Erik wasn’t certain that he was actually hearing the voice in his head. He seemed to sense the words, to feel them, more than hear them. It was a strange experience, and not at all unpleasant. The voice was like a huge, warm hand stroking the rear of his brain. He could just sit back and let it tell him what to do.
He looked at the gun in his hand and wondered how it had got there. Not the physical act of picking it up, but the progression of events that had led him here, to this juncture, where he stood armed and dangerous with a police siege taking place outside the house.
Had it started with his friend Marty’s stabbing, all those months ago? Certainly things had changed soon after that. Marty had subsequently gone to London to help raise another man’s child, leaving behind him that same man’s corpse with a knife wound in its belly. Or had the catalyst been much earlier than that, when he’d gone into business with Monty Bright, a lost, damaged man who always seemed to be looking for something that didn’t exist, not in this world anyway?
So many different roads had brought him here, and he could have avoided none of them. Everything was sucked into the orbit of this big black hole. People, thoughts and memories, ideas… inexorably, it all ended up here, in the Concrete Grove, where it would be devoured by whatever monsters lived behind the scenes.
