‘I don’t know what you want! I don’t know what this is about. Honestly!’
Bliss hung a fist before the man’s startled eyes, extending a finger to point. ‘If you make me ask again, Des, I’m going to fetch a carving knife from your kitchen and I’m going to open up your stomach and let your bowels slop out onto the floor.’
Knowles clamped his lips together, recoiling in terror.
Bliss lowered his face until the two were only inches apart. ‘Are you going to make me ask a fourth time? Disembowelment is not as quick a death as it sounds, Des. There will be plenty of time for me to ask you over and over until you finally do tell me. All while you sit there watching the steam rise up from your own innards.’
Knowles leaned to one side and vomited copiously across the floor. He raised a hand in submission. Bliss nodded to himself and stood upright. He grabbed hold of the man and yanked him to his feet. ‘Lead the way,’ he said, using the sole of his shoe to prod Knowles towards the doorway. ‘And don’t be stupid, Des. You warn whoever’s out there with her, and I’ll take my chance finding her after I’ve ended you.’
Wordlessly, Knowles guided him away from the mobile home, beyond the kennel cages. ‘I keep her out of those,’ he said, as if it were somehow a kindness. ‘She has her own room.’
Bliss said nothing. He shoved Knowles further forward. A light rain had started to fall, and he thought he heard a hissing somewhere away in the distance. Vehicles approaching. Slick rubber on wet tarmac. Close by, water gurgled as it flowed steadily along the drain.
Knowles stopped outside what looked like a brick storeroom and nodded at the door, pointing silently. Bliss snatched up a short run of heavy pipe from the debris that had been left strewn across the yard. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for Knowles to open up. The door squealed ajar, gradually revealing its dreadful contents.
A man on his haunches leaned back against the cold brick wall behind him, chest heaving, sweat leaking from his slick naked body. His mouth hung open, strings of saliva stretching between his lips. His eyes glimmered and dimmed before rolling backwards. At the same time, he let out a low, guttural laugh. ‘That was amazing,’ he panted, shaking his head in wonder. ‘Absolutely fucking amazing.’
Beneath him, Abbi Turner lay motionless on her back. The terribly abused young woman stared at the ceiling in a catatonic trance. At least, that was Bliss’s first thought. Only then did he notice the stillness of her pale white breasts. And unlike the cloud of moist air emerging from the mouth of her defiler, around Abbi’s face there was nothing at all.
On realising what had become of her, Bliss swung the length of pipe without any thought for the consequences, dropping Des Knowles like a crash test dummy. Then he turned his attention to the still-delirious man on the mattress, and advanced upon him.
Forty-Five
Jimmy Bliss did not cry often, but he did that night. Silent tears, trickling slowly at first before flowing steadily in an unchecked stream of utter misery. The sobs soon followed, exerting pressure on his ribs as each wracking heave threatened to break him in two.
At his own insistence, he’d remained at the scene longer than anyone else apart from the CSI team, who’d be there well into the next day. He was there when Neil Abbott, the forensic crime scene manager, declared the spare bedroom sheets to be ‘the Jackson Pollock of the bodily fluids world’. He was there when the piles of women’s clothing were found sealed in large plastic boxes in the crawl space beneath the mobile home. He was there when the scrubbing brush was discovered in the kennel compound, human tissue and blood clogged up in its stiff nylon bristles. He was there when gallons of Vetaclean fluid were uncovered and identified as the probable source of the chemical elements found on Majidah Rassooli’s body. He left only after Abbi Turner was removed from the scene in a black mortuary vehicle.
Inside the incident room upon his return to Thorpe Wood, the mood was sombre, yet one of renewed enthusiasm for the task ahead. It made no difference to him how often he was assured the squad had done its best. Neither did he care to be reminded how close they had come to rescuing Abbi. Five minutes, five hours, or five days; to Bliss’s mind, dead was dead, and no acknowledgement of the vagaries of time and chance would ever change that simple fact. ‘Coming close’ could never be regarded as a successful outcome. The image of the young woman’s lifeless shell replaying across his mind’s eye would forever act as a reminder that between life and death there existed only failure.
Yet in the midst of the sorrow and guilt, he somehow managed to embrace the positives with a grim determination that would serve him well in the days to come. Abbi’s killer had been caught about as red-handed as it was possible to be; the sick and twisted excuse for a human being in the shape of Des Knowles would also trouble no other women in the coming decades. The failure to save Abbi’s life overshadowed these accomplishments entirely as far as Bliss was concerned, yet they were not without merit.
In addition, there was the overarching factor of the investigation to consider: one that would ensure it remained fully active, albeit drastically altered in terms of perception. He and his team had been wrong to initially consider Majidah Rassooli’s murder the work of her employers. He and his team, together with the Met investigation, had been wrong to label the murders of four
