A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2) Page 25

  He looked, again, at the photograph of York, Burns and Miller.

  York was lying; what was he lying about, and how deep did those lies go?

  Atticus was worried: why wasn’t Jessica answering her phone?

  He grabbed his jacket and set off for the street.

  Atticus pushed his way through the doors into the hotel lobby and, ignoring the staff member behind the desk, made his way straight up the stairs to the first floor. He jogged down the corridor to Mack’s room and rapped his knuckles against the door.

  She opened the door. “You’re early,” she said; then, when she noticed the frantic cast to his face, she frowned. “What is it?”

  “We have a problem. It’s DC Edwards.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s in trouble. Mack—I missed something about Burns and Miller.”

  She paused, looking at him quizzically, before stepping aside to let him in.

  Atticus had printed out his copy of the photograph that he had taken at the colonel’s house and laid it on the bed.

  “What’s this?” Mack said.

  “This was in the sitting room at Miller’s house. You should recognise these two.” He stabbed his finger against first Burns and then Miller.

  “So? We know they knew each other. Miller admitted it.”

  “He did. But look here.” He dragged his finger up to the middle of the back row. “What about him?”

  Mack looked at the man and shook her head. “Who’s that?”

  Atticus took out the printout of the photo from Facebook and laid it on the bed.

  Mack compared the two photographs and frowned. “James York? The father of the missing girl?”

  “Burns, Miller and York all served together in Northern Ireland in the eighties. They were in Londonderry together, and I’ll bet you whatever you like that York took the photo in the bedroom. And then they all ended up back in Salisbury. All three of them. We know that Burns was blackmailing Miller.”

  “And you think Burns was blackmailing York, too?”

  “It’s possible. Molly York ran away from home within a month or two of Alfred Burns’s murder. Why did she do that?”

  “You think York was involved?”

  “I’m starting to think that.”

  “But what does it have to do with Edwards?”

  “Molly went missing for a second time on Friday night. I called Jessica to ask if Molly had gone back to London to be with the boy she was seeing there. But he’d come down here, and I thought it was likely that he was here to see her. Jessica came to find him, but he’s gone back to London, and Molly isn’t with him. Jessica left her warrant card with York, and she was going to stop and pick it up on the way home.”

  “And?”

  “And now she’s not answering her phone. I called York, and he said that she had been there, but she’d left. The problem with that is I don’t believe him. He’s lying. I’m sure he’s lying. It is at least possible that York was involved with Burns and Miller, and that he had something to do with Burns’s death. What if Molly ran away because she found out about that? What if I was employed to find her because York was concerned that she might give him away? What if Jessica found something out that threatened him? I don’t know, Mack—it’s all possible, and I can’t get through to her to check that I’m wrong.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go out there now. I just wanted you to know—just in case.”

  “You can’t go barging onto someone’s property, Atticus. You’re not police.”

  “So you keep telling me. But I can’t just sit here and wait.”

  “No, you can’t.” She got up and unhooked her jacket from the back of the chair. “Are you going to drive, or shall I?”

  71

  Jessica was woken by the throbbing in her head. It pulsed from just above her ear, arcing down her neck and into her right shoulder. She felt nauseous, too, a curdling in her gut that she knew would rush up her gullet the moment she moved. She was lying on her side against hard ground. Her legs were bent, with her feet pressed against her backside, and her arms were behind her back. She tried to straighten out, but couldn’t. She felt a tightening around her wrists and ankles as she strained and realised that she had been hog-tied.

  Something had been stuffed into her mouth. It filled her cheeks and pushed up against her teeth and, when she probed at it with her tongue, it felt rough and fibrous. She opened her mouth as wide as she could manage and pushed with her tongue, forcing whatever it was out bit by bit until she was able to get rid of it completely.

  She gasped for breath. It was dark; so dark, in fact, that she had to blink her eyes to make sure that she had not imagined opening them. Her stomach settled a little, enough for her to move a little more. She waited for her eyes to adjust; there was a little light filtering in from somewhere overhead, and she was able to see enough to tell that she was in an enclosed space of some sort. Whatever was above her looked as if it had gaps, enough for slivers of the very faintest light to pass through.

  “Hello?” A girl’s voice came from close by. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” Jessica mumbled through dry lips. “I’m awake.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I banged my head.”

  There was a pause; Jessica could hear the sound of water droplets nearby, a regular tick, tick, tick as they fell to the floor.

  “Where am I?”

  “In the cellar,” the girl said. “Under the barn.”

  Jessica felt the panic bubble up and, before she could stop herself, she yelled, “Help! Someone—help!”

  “Don’t,” the girl said. “No one can hear us here, and you’ll just upset my dad. He’ll punish you if you don’t behave.”

  Jessica’s breath was ragged. She stopped shouting and focused on her breathing, inhaling a deep breath through her nose and then letting it out as steadily as she could through her lips. It helped; after a moment, the panic subsided a little.

  “Are you Molly?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “My name’s Jessica. I’m a police officer. I was there when your dad found you in London.”

  Jessica tried to flex her arms, but the ties were too tight. She grunted with the effort, but the edges of the plastic cuffs dug into her skin.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Are you tied up, too?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes.”

  Jessica tried again, but it was futile; she arranged herself so that she wasn’t leaning back onto her shoulders in an attempt to find a little more comfort. She tried to think how long she had been down here. It had been early evening when she had arrived at the house. It was difficult to know how many hours had passed since then. The minuscule amount of light that reached them through the gaps above could have been artificial, or, equally, it could have been moonlight. It was impossible to say.

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Molly said.

  Jessica shifted her weight again. “What happened to you?”

  “Dad put me down here when we came home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a bad person. He knows I’ll run away again otherwise.”

  Jessica felt a quiver of fear. “How is he bad?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  Jessica heard the sound of something scratching away to her left. She looked, but couldn’t see anything.

  “There are rats here,” Molly said.

  Jessica thought she could make out a shape in the darkness next to her. The tiny amount of light fell onto something that looked solid, more substantial than the gloom around it.

  “Molly,” she said, “do you know what that is over there?”

  “His name was Jordan.”

  “Jordan Lamb?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I went to see him today. He wasn’t there.”

  “He’s been here since las
t night.”

  “Jordan!” Jessica called out.

  “He’s dead,” Molly said. “Dad told me what he was going to do. He took my phone and sent Jordan a message, pretending to be me. He shot him with the bolt gun and dumped him down here with me.”

  Jessica felt bile rising in her throat.

  “I told you—my dad’s evil.”

  “What else has he done?”

  “He kills people. There was another person. A man. I saw it. I don’t know his name. I hadn’t seen him before. Dad thought I was out, but I wasn’t. I was smoking a joint in the woods. There was an argument. I saw it. Dad shot him with the bolt gun.”

  That term again. “The what?”

  “He uses it when he needs to kill one of the cows. Dad put it against his head and…” The words petered out.

  Jessica tried to speak, but her words were lost in the white-hot flood of panic that swept over her. She tried to free her wrists again, ignoring the pain as the cuffs sliced into her skin, yanking against them so that she might loosen them enough to slide a hand through. It was a waste of time. They were too tight.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Molly said. “You’ll just hurt yourself, and even if you did get out, what then? We’re locked in the cellar. There’s a bolt that fastens the trapdoor, and Dad usually puts his truck over it as well. There’s no way out.”

  72

  Atticus tried Jessica’s number again as they pulled out of Salisbury and again as they arrived at the outskirts of Broughton.

  “Nothing?” Mack said.

  “Voicemail. She should have been back in London hours ago.”

  “She couldn’t have lost her phone? Or it’s out of battery?”

  “Possible, but unlikely.”

  “Maybe she’s had an accident on the way home.”

  “I checked. Nothing’s been reported. No, Mack. York lied to me. Something’s wrong.”

  “All right. We’ll check it out and see what we can find.”

  “And what if we don’t find anything?”

  She shrugged. “What do you want to do? We don’t have enough to arrest York. All we know is that he served in the same regiment as Burns and Miller.”

  “There has to be a connection.”

  “Find the evidence. We can go from there.”

  Mack switched off the lights as they turned onto the lane that led to the farm. “Where is it?”

  “Down there.” Atticus pointed. “Pull over. We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

  Mack pulled over and parked in a passing space that was still a good fifty yards from the gate. She reached for the ignition and killed the engine.

  She swivelled around to face him across the cabin. “How do you want to do this?”

  “I’ll go and look around.”

  “Not on your own.”

  “We can’t just ring the bell.”

  “And we can’t trespass, either.”

  “You can’t,” Atticus corrected. “I can. As you keep reminding me, I’m not a police officer.”

  He opened the door and stepped out into the cold, damp night. There was enough of a glow from the moon to see that there was no one else outside with them. Mack got out, too, and quietly shut the door behind her. They set off. Atticus walked briskly, a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. They reached the entrance with the black iron gates. The drive was as he remembered it, wending its way through the neatly cut trees to the farmhouse. The windows were dark.

  “Looks quiet,” Atticus said.

  Mack checked her watch. “It’s midnight,” she said. “He might be asleep.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He had already decided that he would break into the house if he had to. He knew Mack would protest, but he would ignore her. Something had happened to Jessica, and he knew that waiting for everything to be done by the book would not be tenable. She might not have the time for that and, he reminded himself, it wasn’t as if they had grounds for an application for a warrant to go inside; a bad feeling on the part of a disgraced ex-policeman was not one of them.

  They continued down the lane. The perimeter of the property was marked by a yew hedge on the right that was thick and tall, perhaps ten feet high. An old rusted iron fence had been subsumed by the yew over time, the two creating a boundary that would be difficult to breach. They walked on, following the gentle bend in the road until they came to a second gate. This one was agricultural, with barbed wire wound around the top rail to discourage people from clambering over it. A dirt track led into the broad field beyond.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ll go in and look around. I’ll call you if—”

  “Shut up,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m coming with you. Come on.”

  73

  Atticus took off his jacket and used it to cover the barbed wire. He climbed over and waited for Mack. They were in the field that lay to the north of the farmhouse. The moon was directly overhead, and the light cast the open space in a silvered glow. The field was empty and, to the right, the house looked as peaceful as it had when they had looked at it through the bars of the gate.

  “Look,” Mack said, pointing.

  Atticus had already noticed it: the light of a torch jerked around in the gloom in the direction of the farm buildings to the north.

  “What’s he doing out there this late?” she said.

  “Nothing good.”

  They heard the sound of an engine firing up, and then saw a blue Ford Ranger edging out of the open door.

  Atticus set off at a jog. Mack caught up, the two of them splashing through ankle-high ruts that were filled with muddy water. The barn was a quarter of a mile away from them now, and they slowed to a careful walk when they drew near enough to think that the sound of their approach might betray them. Atticus could see more now. The doors had been pulled back, and two vehicles were parked next to one another: the Ford Ranger and a BMW.

  “See the BMW?” he hissed. “That’s her car.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “York’s.”

  The torchlight was inside the barn now, a steady beam that suggested that the source had been set down somewhere. Atticus crept ahead, Mack close behind. Atticus heard the creak of something moving on unoiled hinges, and the beam of the torch was interrupted as a trapdoor was opened, blocking it from where Atticus and Mack were standing.

  Atticus heard the sound of a voice.

  “Did you hear that?” Mack hissed.

  Atticus held up his hand for silence.

  Not one voice: there were two.

  The first was female and panicked; the second was male and stern.

  He started forward again, stepping through another puddle, and, over the quiet susurration of his boots through the water, there came the sound of a scream and then the thud of an impact.

  “Go left,” Mack whispered, pointing to the left of the Ranger.

  They split up. The fear that had sat in Atticus’s gut was worse now, curdled into a dread that they were too late. He reached the side of the Ranger before Mack and was afforded a view into the interior of the barn. The trapdoor was in the middle of the space, pulled all the way back so that it was resting against the Ford’s front bumper. The torch was on the floor behind it, its glow pooling against the wall to the left and providing enough illumination for Atticus to see the body that lay sprawled on the floor. It was a woman, hog-tied and with a rope looped around her waist that looked as if it might have been used as a tether or a leash.

  He recognised the jacket that Jessica had been wearing earlier that day.

  A man was standing between Jessica and Atticus. He had his back turned, but Atticus could see that it was James York. He had the rope in his right hand and was looping it through a metal ring that had been concreted into the floor. Jessica’s head hung down low, and Atticus could see blood running freely from it. York must have struck her.

  York walked over to a table at the side of the barn and picked up what loo
ked like a very large handgun. Atticus knew what it was: a captive bolt gun of the sort used to kill cattle. He had seen one before. It fired a retractable bolt into the animal’s head, killing it immediately. York checked the gun and, evidently satisfied, walked back to where Jessica had fallen.

  “Police! Stop!”

  Mack had come out around the other side of the vehicle.

  York turned to Mack.

  “I’m a police officer, Mr. York. You need to put that down—right now.”

  York took a step toward Mack. She was unarmed and, if York hadn’t already realised that she was here without backup, it wouldn’t take him long to reach that conclusion.

  Atticus edged around the Ranger and broke into a flat run before York could notice him. He threw himself at the older man, wrapping his arms around him and tackling him to the ground. They both slammed down onto the rough concrete floor, mud smearing across them as they rolled first one way and then the other. Atticus wrestled himself on top and tried to pin York down. York was heavier and fit and strong for his age. Atticus locked his fists in the shoulders of York’s jacket and shoved down, trying to press him in place until Mack could get over to help. York slithered left and right, opening up enough of an angle to drive his knee up and into Atticus’s groin. The pain flashed, causing Atticus to loosen his grip for just long enough that York could punch up, his fist connecting with Atticus’s cheekbone. He fell off York and onto his back and, before he could do anything to stop him, York was on top of him. Atticus stared up into his face, and then across at the bolt gun in York’s right hand as he tried to force it down. Atticus tried to block his arm, but York punched him with his left hand, and then again. Atticus bit down on his tongue and tasted the blood in his mouth.