I shut my eyes and thought of Joe. Joe Riggs, the man who’d been good to me down the years. The man I’d betrayed by sleeping with his missus, and now the man who was almost certainly dead as a direct result of me getting him involved in a dangerous scheme when all he’d wanted to do was run a business in peace.
There was a noise downstairs. Footsteps on the bare floorboards in the hall, faint but distinctly audible. Someone was moving around down there. This time I slid out of bed, pulled on trousers and a shirt, and picked up the gun. I paused and listened again. It had stopped. I decided to investigate, just in case. The holdall was under the bed but I made the decision to leave it where it was. I’d be back in a few moments. To hinder anyone who thought they could sneak in and take it, I removed the light-bulb from the main light and placed it under the pillow.
Slowly, I unlocked the door and opened it as quietly as possible, then stepped outside, straining against the silence. The other doors on the landing were all shut, and nothing moved. Flicking the safety off the gun, I crept over to the stairs. The lights at the bottom were all extinguished, just as I’d left them, but that meant nothing. Someone had definitely been creeping about down there and, whatever the reason was, I was sure there was nothing innocent about it. Could it have been Kalinski deciding to ignore his instructions and to finish off Krys? If he had, he hadn’t come back up the stairs again, nobody had. Maybe he’d taken his share and left. But then I would have heard a car start, and I hadn’t.
The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, the second time they’d done that in just over a fortnight. The first had been in the minutes before Tony Franks had started shooting, and sent us all down the rocky road to where we were now.
I took a step onto one of the stairs and it creaked loudly, interrupting the night’s silence. I stood still for a moment, resisting the urge to call out the way they always do in horror films, just before they get sliced into salami by the killer. Is anyone there? If someone was, he didn’t want to be discovered. Hearing nothing, I took a second step, paused, then continued down the stairs as cautiously as possible.
When I was at the bottom, I concentrated on trying to pick up any sound that might seem out of place. Breathing, the shuffling of feet … but the dead silence remained. My eyes scanned the gloom, the darkness almost inpenetrable, only thin shafts of half-light coming through the kitchen windows.
I took two rapid steps forward and switched on all the lights to the hall, then turned and started. Because I spotted it immediately.
The cellar door was half an inch ajar. I’d definitely locked it, no question, and I’d also been the last person in there. Which meant one of two things, neither very good. Either he’d escaped, or …
I stepped forward, and pushed the door wider. It was silent, and the air smelt fetid, as it always did. Krys Holtz had been incarcerated in there for three days. He stank, no question. I put a foot on the cellar steps, took a quick look round to check there was no-one behind me, and switched on the light.
I could see Krys’s feet. So he was still there. I moved down the steps, one at a time, trying to make as little noise as possible …
And froze.
Krys lay back in his seat, still bound and gagged, still wearing the clothes I’d left him in, but very very dead. His throat had been sliced through deeply. The head was hanging back in the seat at such a precarious angle that only the fact that it was leaning against the wall prevented it from toppling off altogether. Blood had turned the front of his shirt a deep crimson and it had run down onto the tops of his legs. The blindfold had been removed, too, and his eyes were wide and terrified. The killer, then, had given him advance warning of what he’d intended.
I moved closer to the body and touched the forehead. Still warm. The flow of blood had stopped and it was coagulating rapidly round the throat region, so it was unlikely he’d been killed in the last few minutes, but it hadn’t been hours ago either.
I hurried back up the steps, switched the light off, listened for a few moments to check that no-one was waiting at the top for me, and then stepped out. I walked back into the hallway, then round to the front door. It was locked. I doubled back and checked the back door of the house, which led into the utility room. Also locked. I went back through the hallway and into the kitchen, holding the Glock tightly, and went to check on the kitchen door, the last means of entry into the house.
It was unlocked. I couldn’t remember if I’d checked it earlier or not, but thought I had. I’d been security conscious these past few nights, even more so since we’d taken ownership of all that money, but so much had happened that I couldn’t recall anything for sure.
I stopped for a moment and thought about it. Who knew we were here? Who wanted Krys Holtz dead? Who would have bothered
