Just briefly.
I turned my hands over and saw a small tuft of rope had been lifted. It might take me a week to saw through them like this, but I wasn’t going anywhere, and I had nothing better to do.
Tempest. The House of Matilda Carpenter. Friday, December 23rd 1648hrs
Hilary opted to come with me on the drive to Chartham Hatch. I still couldn’t remember the name of the couple I was going to visit, but prayed Karen Gilbert was still living with them. The thing is, I didn’t think she was.
That I could not remember the things Jane had told me about this case banged around in my head like a haunting reminder. I knew she had talked about Karen Gilbert in the last week or so, and that I was guilty of only half listening. Admittedly, I had several distractions of my own, but it didn’t feel like a justifiable excuse right now.
With a huff, I pressed my accelerator a little harder.
‘You’re worried about her?’ asked Hilary, breaking the silence in the car.
I pursed my lips and grimaced into the darkness ahead. ‘I am. I don’t see how we can possibly work out who this guy is and find him before he does whatever he has planned.’
Carefully, Hilary asked, ‘Have you told the police?’
‘I shoved it down Quinn’s throat,’ I growled. ‘He will react, but his focus will be on covering his backside, not saving Jane. He would most likely throw all his officers at it if I could provide him with a reliable location and therein lies the crux of our challenge.’
Hilary added up what he already knew. ‘No one knows who the Sandman really is.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘No. We’ll figure it out, you can bet on that. The question is whether we can do that before he kills Jane.’
I fumbled in my jacket pocket to retrieve my phone without taking my eyes off the road. Tossing it to Hilary, I asked, ‘Can you call Amanda and put it on speaker, please?’
He fiddled for a moment with the unfamiliar device, but within seconds, Amanda’s voice crackled over the airwaves.
‘Tempest? Any luck?’
‘Not yet. We are nearly there though. Did Jan call back?’
I got a similar answer to the one I gave her. ‘Not yet. I’ll try him again, but I already left messages and a voicemail. He finished his shift and went home so I guess he is in the bath with the music loud or something.’
The Friday before Christmas – chances are he and Jane had a table for dinner booked somewhere and plans that were completely scuppered though Jan didn’t yet know it. I wanted him on the team.
Amanda asked, ‘Hey, I just wondered why you hadn’t called in Frank and Poison?’
I considered including them right off the bat when we were still running from the hospital. Frank Decaux is the owner of an occult bookshop just around the corner from my office. He’s chosen to involve himself in my adventures many times, usually because he believes in everything paranormal and wants to be there when I meet a real vampire or werewolf. If I made the call, I would find him ready to throw his lot in without even telling him what it was that we were doing. Yet his particular brand of wackiness was one that might not lend itself well to this investigation.
Frank would always choose to believe a supernatural explanation first and my head was filled with visions of him extolling the office with tales of demons who liked to sing to their victims. Or he would claim the Sandman was a land-based siren or come up with something even more daft than I could imagine.
I didn’t need the distraction and that was how I explained it to Amanda.
Our call ended as I left the motorway near Canterbury. It was less than two miles to the village of Chartham Hatch which we covered in three minutes.
In the street I remembered visiting once before, it took me a few seconds to work out which house I wanted. I was doing it only from memory of a single visit in the daylight and the Christmas lights dotted about were throwing me.
Mercifully, I got it right and the name of the lady of the house popped into my head just as a shadow behind the door opened it.
‘Matilda?’ I asked as the door swung wide to reveal her grumpy face.
Now I remembered her. She had a brow-beaten husband who she berated constantly during the few minutes I was in the house last time. I came to visit Karen, but Matilda refused to let me out of her sight.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, her tone unpleasant.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I replied studiously, to which I received a sneering expression. ‘I need to speak with Karen.’
‘Well, she is not here,’ Matilda snapped back at me. ‘She moved out two days after you were last here.’
I could not say I blamed her, but I needed to speak with Karen Gilbert more than I needed oxygen, so I said, ‘It is urgent that I talk to her tonight, Matilda. If you are her friend, you will tell me where she is or give me her number.’
She snorted a laugh. ‘No chance.’
Unable to stop myself, I closed the gap between us, fighting my rising anger to keep a face that begged for trust.
‘Matilda, the Sandman has taken Jane, the investigator who helped Karen three weeks ago.’
‘You mean the crossdresser,’ she sneered.
Unwilling to be drawn into an argument, I said,
