Her glasses are scratched, the pads digging into the side of her nose, but that’s nothing compared to the searing agony as her brain tries to batter its way out of her skull.
Everything’s the wrong way around.
What happened to the kitchen?
She’d been in a kitchen, hadn’t she? At someone’s house? Now she’s in a large, low room with a manky couch and coffee table sitting in the middle of the space, beneath a single spotlight. The rest of the place is barely visible in the gloom, but it’s far too big to be a garage.
‘Ah, you’re awake. That’s a shame.’ Someone fumbles with her jacket, hauling it off her. ‘Shhh... It’s OK. It’ll all be over soon.’ A face swims into focus: high forehead fringed with brown hair, a beard, little round glasses. Dr Christianson. He grabs the hem of her stripy top and tugs it upwards, turning it inside out as he pulls it up over her arms and head, till she’s lying there on the dusty concrete floor in jeans and bra.
‘Don’t...’ The words are heavy and slippery in Lucy’s mouth. ‘Don’t touch... me...’
‘It’s all right, Lucy, I know what happened to you from the papers, but I’m only taking off your clothes to make it easier to cut you open and remove your heart, OK? It’s nothing sexual.’ He folds her top and places it on her jacket, beside her boots and socks. ‘And after that, you’ll be free. No more worries, or troubles, or pain. No more being alone.’ He squats down beside her again. ‘Now, let’s get those trousers off, and—’
‘NO!’ Her fist smashes into his face, hard enough to snap his head back like a gunshot.
He crashes into the manky couch, sending up a plume of dust that glows in the spotlight, both hands trembling in front of his face as blood courses from his ruined nose. ‘Unnnnnnnnngh...’
And she’s on top of him, pinning him to the dirty upholstery, fists raining down like mortar shells. ‘DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T EVER TOUCH ME!’ Until he’s nothing more than a rag doll, twitching each time a blow lands, bright-red bubbles popping between swollen lips.
Lucy scrambles off Dr Christianson and into her clothes again. Running, barefoot, out of the long low room, up a flight of stairs, down a mildew-stinking corridor, bursting through an old wooden door into the warm fresh air. Folding over and vomiting, one hand clutching her stomach, the other braced against her knee — holding her upright.
When she finally wipes away the last spiralling string of yellow-green saliva and straightens up, she’s not in Castleview any more. She’s standing outside an old brick building, looking across Kings River at MacKinnon Quay, with its collection of brightly coloured boats and ships. While the sound of an angle grinder screeches from a workshop, somewhere nearby.
Lucy huffs out a sour breath.
Then smiles a cold hard smile.
Turns around.
And heads back inside.
Charlie held his arms out, as if he was about to take a bow. ‘And they all lived unhappily ever after. The end.’
‘Please, Lucy, I’m so hungry.’
She stared into the gloom. ‘Oh God...’
‘So, you see, you’ve been coming here for ages. Asking the same questions, over and over. And Dr Christianson does his best to help you get better, even though you won’t let him use his real name. He has to be Dr McNaughton, because that was your childhood therapist, remember? The one who spent all those years trying to fix you after Mum died? Who taught you that trick about smiling in the mirror?’
‘I’ve been keeping him prisoner?’ Backing away.
‘Arrest me! Please. Make it stop...’
‘Don’t you think he’s suffered enough, Lucy?’
Charlie was right: she is a monster.
Never mind getting fired, she’d go to jail for this. Or a psychiatric institution. Probably both.
‘Please, Lucy...’
‘You have to arrest him, Lucy. I know you can’t trust him — he can promise to keep it secret, but when they get him alone he’ll tell them all about what happened here. But that’s OK, isn’t it? This way you can get the help you need, and his victims’ families can finally bury their loved ones.’
The dark room danced and swayed, then warm tears spilled out onto her cheeks.
‘You owe it to the six people he killed.’
‘Seven.’ Scrubbing them away with the palm of her hand. ‘He killed seven people.’
‘Oh, Lucy... He’s been chained up in here for nearly eight weeks, how could he murder Malcolm Louden?’ Charlie pointed towards the back wall. ‘It’s six people. See?’
She let the torchlight drift upwards till something glinted in the darkness. More than one something. Stepping closer brought the beam near enough to pick out six large glass jars, like the ones pickled onions came in, only instead of little white spheres, each one of the six held a single human heart, surrounded by cloudy yellow-pink liquid. ‘Oh Jesus...’ She backed away.
Charlie followed her. ‘I know it’s hard, Lucy, but it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Lucy, don’t go! Please don’t go!’
‘Who are you?’ She pinned Charlie in the torch’s glow.
‘You know who I am.’
She jabbed the rape alarm at him. ‘WHO ARE YOU?’
‘I’m you.’
‘Sarge?’ It was the Dunk’s voice, right in her ear. ‘Sarge, you still there?’
Lucy blinked. Where the hell...
It was a quiet residential street, the kind of place that had neat little gardens out front and bigger ones out back. The sound of small children playing somewhere nearby. Magpies cackling. A lawnmower humming. The sweet smoky scent of a barbecue in full swing.
‘Sarge?’
‘What? Yeah. Sorry.’ When she turned around, the view dipped down towards Montgomery Park, with Kings River in the middle distance and Castle Hill on the other side. Which made this Blackwall Hill. She locked her knees to stop them giving way. ‘Got a bit distracted there. What were we talking about?’
A sigh huffed out of the phone. ‘You abandoning me at Dr Christianson’s house. Are you sure you’re OK? Only you’ve been acting even weirder since Benedict Strachan pushed you in front of that train. When you hit your head?’
Lucy rubbed a hand across her eyes.
Maybe that’s all this was: some sort of delayed concussion? She didn’t have Dr Christianson locked up in an old chandler’s warehouse down by Queen’s Quay, and Charlie wasn’t in on it. Because that really would be crazy. Benedict Strachan shoved her off the platform, she fell and bashed her head on one of the train tracks, and now she was... suffering from concussion. That’s all.
Should’ve gone straight to A & E for an X-ray or an MRI. Could be walking around with a fractured skull and swelling on the brain for all anyone knew. It would certainly explain a lot. Like assaulting a member of Professional Standards.
‘Sorry. For abandoning you. I wasn’t... How angry was he?’
‘Sarge?’
‘Never mind.’ She’d find out soon enough anyway. Concussion or not, Charlie was hardly going to look kindly on getting punched in the face. ‘Where are you now?’
‘Back at the station. Got a bus.’
You’d think Charlie would at least have given the Dunk a lift, but there you go. Probably too busy planning his revenge.
‘Sorry.’
There was something... familiar about the street: the way it curved around to the right; the post box sitting at the bottom, where the road joined onto a cul-de-sac; the stubby two-storey houses with their pink-grey pantiles and faux-mullioned windows.