Mr X’s pupils shrank with fear in their dirty-brown irises. Then he caught hold of himself, and his nostrils flared. “Go on. Do it. Do it!” His voice was defiant, almost goading.
As if someone had struck his elbow, Julian’s hand shot towards the knife’s hilt, but stopped just short of it. For several seconds, it wavered back and forth as if caught between two opposing forces. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, he snatched it back. Mr X’s leering, contemptuous grin returned as Julian rose and approached the shelves. Names and dates were written on the spines of the videotapes and DVDs, which were seemingly arranged in no particular order. He searched fruitlessly for his disc and any discs dating to the day of Mia’s disappearance. “You won’t find your disc,” said Mr X, guessing in part what he was looking for. “And even if you did, it wouldn’t do you any good. I told you, it’s just a copy.”
“I think you’re lying. There was no time to make copies.”
“Maybe you’re right, but even if I am lying you still can’t leave me alive. Not unless you want that reporter to find out what’s behind your mask.”
“I’m not afraid of showing people the truth of myself.”
Mr X gurgled with harsh laughter, blowing bloody bubbles. “Who’s lying now?”
“I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I agree. All of us here do,” Mr X said softly, and with what seemed genuine sympathy, as if they were surrounded by phantoms with which he and Julian shared an intimate, sorrowful kinship. “We accept you for what you are, but no one else will. You’ll be an outcast, worse than dead. Is that really what you want?”
“I…” Julian’s voice faltered.
“It’s still not too late, Julian. Ring Mike Hill, stop him from coming here.”
“The truth…” Julian swayed as if he might fall over. “I’m going to show you…”
“How are you going to show me the truth?” Mr X’s voice grew stronger, as if feeding on Julian’s weakness. “By killing me? By destroying yourself? That’s not the truth, Julian, that’s just a different kind of lie.”
Julian clutched the shelves for support, his eyes moving back and forth along them. Most of the names were unfamiliar. Some he seemed to vaguely recognise. Two were all too familiar. The first of these didn’t surprise him. After everything Mr X had said, he’d guessed he’d find Tom Benson’s name. The second caused his breathing to stop momentarily. “Michael Ridgway,” he murmured. “The A1 Murderer.”
“One of our more illustrious members,” boasted Mr X.
Julian looked at him as if he doubted his sanity. “He was a serial killer.”
“No, merely a serial abductor. To my knowledge, Michael only ever killed one girl. The rest he sold to us. Funny thing is, the police charged him with the murders of all the girls except the one he actually killed.”
“Susan Carter.”
“Once again, you’ve impressed me, Julian. How did you know that?”
“My grandma tried to help her parents find her body.”
Mr X nearly choked on a bubble of mocking laughter. “Ah yes, of course, your psychic granny.”
“So Susan Carter and all those other girls died here.”
“I’ll let you find out for yourself what happened to them.” Mr X rolled his eyes at the shelves. “They’re all up there somewhere.”
A sudden thought struck Julian, shaking his certainty that Eleanor was alive and unmolested. “You said you never go near girls like Susan Carter.”
“I didn’t tell Michael to take Susan. He took her on an impulse, because he saw her and wanted her. I was angry. But I couldn’t stay angry with him for long. He was such a nice man.”
“A nice man!” Julian’s voice was rank with incredulous revulsion. Reassured, however, he removed Michael Ridgway’s disc and, very carefully, as if it was something fragile and precious, inserted it into the DVD player. The TV flickered into life, showing the adjoining room. Michael Ridgway was pacing agitatedly up and down beside the bed. He was middle-aged, balding, paunchy. Nobody out of the ordinary. Nobody you’d give a second glance. He stopped pacing when the chauffeur entered with his hands on Susan Carter’s shoulders, guiding her in front of him. The chauffeur closed the door, leaving her alone with Michael Ridgway.
Michael Ridgway looked at Susan Carter and she looked back at him. A minute passed, two minutes. Neither of them moved, spoke, or even seemed to breathe. Julian might’ve thought the DVD was faulty, if it hadn’t been for Susan Carter’s eyes. They were alive with fear. It seeped out of them, seemed to seep right out of the screen into his heart, pleading for help, for mercy. Suddenly, as if acting on some silent signal known only to himself, Michael Ridgway lashed out, hitting Susan Carter full in the face. Without a sound, she collapsed to the carpet and lay with her eyes closed, motionless as a doll. Michael Ridgway stared down at her a moment, his eyes blank and dead, like a shark’s. Then, straddling her waist, he hit her again, and again, and again, mechanically, relentlessly. To Julian, the beating seemed to go on for hours. He flinched at every blow, but didn’t turn away from the screen. Something was building inside him, something he needed. Finally, Michael Ridgway stopped and stood off Susan Carter. Except she wasn’t recognisable as Susan Carter anymore. Now she was recognisable only as something dead. A piece of meat. Michael Ridgway’s chest heaved, but his expression was calm, almost serene, as he looked at himself in the mirror, then looked through the mirror directly into Julian’s eyes. There was no spark of connection. The eyes were as unrecognisable to Julian as those that’d glared out of his Grandma Alice’s possessed face.
The screen went blank. But Julian continued to stare at it, trembling, pressure building inside him until he couldn’t contain it any longer. In an eruption of white-hot fury, he lunged at Mr X and drove the knife into him fully to the hilt. A scream croaked in Mr X’s throat. His body spasmed into a tight, foetal ball. Then he lay silent and limp.
After that, in a kind of semi-conscious frenzy, Julian started tearing the house apart, searching vainly for his DVD or any clues to Mia’s whereabouts. In one room, he found a trunk of dildos, lubricants, whips, chains, leather wrist and ankle restraints, and other sex paraphernalia. In another, he shuddered at the discovery of a cupboard neatly stacked with latex gloves, duct tape and plastic wrap. He was in the kitchen, flinging stuff out of a cubby-hole so that he could get to a trapdoor, when Mike Hill arrived.
“Hello,” Mike called from the hallway, his voice uncertain, perhaps even a little afraid. “Julian, are you there?”
“In here,” Julian shouted, yanking at the trapdoor’s handle.
Mike gasped when he saw Julian. “What happened to you?”
“Help me open this.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Quivering tendons stood out on Julian’s neck as he strained to lift the trapdoor. He pitched backward as the handle slipped through his sweaty, blood-stained hands. “For fuck’s sake, help me.”
“No. Not until you tell me whose house this is, and whose car that is all smashed up outside, and why there’s a dead dog in some kind of-”
“There’s no time,” Julian interrupted breathlessly. “Don’t you understand? She might be down there.”
“Who’s she?”
“Mia!”
Mike’s eyes widened. “Mia Bradshaw?”
“Yes. Now help me.”
They both bent to grasp the handle. Faces reddening, arms trembling, they lifted the thick, wooden trapdoor. Stairs led down into darkness. There was a switch inside the hatch. Julian flicked it and a bulb flickered into life down below, illuminating a dirty concrete floor. The stairs led to a large, low-ceilinged cellar full of exactly what you might expect to find in such a place — a well-stocked wine rack, a tool bench, some dusty old furniture piled in a corner, a row of shelves crammed with cleaning products, rusting cans of paint, boxes, and glass jars full of nails and screws. Julian’s eyes scoured the room. He rushed over to the furniture, and started flinging chairs and tables aside. They concealed nothing.
“There’s nothing down here,” said Mike. “It’s just an ordinary cellar.”
“That’s exactly what he wants you to think.”
“Who?”
Without replying, Julian turned to the shelves and swept his arm along them, sending their contents crashing to the floor.
“Stop, Julian.” Mike caught hold of Julian’s arm and pulled him away from the shelves.
