He counted the numbers down until he reached the white door of the ninth house. The windows were dark. Weeds had grown up between the cracks in the pavement, and the bare bulb of the outside light was broken. It was the right street, the right house, but it was quite unlike any of the other eight he had visited. The others had all been in better parts of their various cities, more expensive houses in the up-and-coming suburbs if not the heart of the cities themselves, but not this one. This place smacked of poverty. He could feel the desperation crawling up and down his skin like mites.
Of course, the benefit of a street like this was, if the curtains didn’t twitch, he doubted very much if anyone would call the police either.
He walked up to the door, and taking the Browning from his belt holster, broke the small window with the butt of the gun. He knocked out the jagged glass teeth left behind and reached through for the lock. He had assumed the deadbolt wouldn’t have been set if the occupants had been bundled off in a hurry. He was right. The door swung open.
Frost stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
The first thing that hit him was the smell.
He gagged and had to fight back the urge to vomit, the stench was that intense.
He knew the smell. There was only one thing in the world that owned this odor: new death.
At least a week’s worth of unopened mail spilled across the mat, along with the newspapers. He knelt down and counted eight days’ worth of unread news. So, nine days ago the inhabitants of this small two-up two-down terrace in the middle of the wrong part of town had been taken. The feel of this place, even in the dark, was different. He didn’t turn on the light as he walked, trailing his fingers along the wall to make sure he didn’t stumble. He found the end of the balustrade and worked his way carefully up the stairs. The house was quiet. The higher he climbed the worse the smell became. Moonlight streamed in silver through an upstairs window, casting a long light slash through the shadows of the dark house. In the light he saw the swirls of wallpaper that had been hung back in the mid-70s. It felt coarse and heavy beneath his fingers.
He heard his own breathing and realized it had become shallower and sharper with each new step. He knew what was waiting up there. But that didn’t mean he could just turn his back and head off looking for house number ten. Indeed, the fact that he knew what was waiting for him meant it was all the more important that he face it. It was exactly what he had come looking for: proof.
His first thought as he reached the landing was that something had gone wrong. The open area didn’t feel right. It wasn’t Feng Shui. It was far more instinctive and predictive than that. People had a way of arranging the things in their life so that they were simple, functional. Furniture placement was repetitive. He could go into rooms blind and know even before he stepped through the door how a good number of those rooms were laid out. But the first floor landing was wrong. It was out of balance.
It took him a second to realize why. The chair that should have been in the right angle, where the balustrade met the immersion cupboard at the far side of the landing, had been dragged out so that it half-blocked the way into the bathroom. Its back was toward him. He tried to picture the struggle that would have turned it. On the opposite wall the blanket box had a thicker band of shadow on the side nearest him, meaning it hadn’t been pushed back up against the wall properly. In his mind’s eye Frost pictured someone on their back, thrashing about as they were dragged toward the stairs. They caught the chair and tried to hold onto it as it twisted away from the wall. They kicked out with their right foot, trying to get some sort of leverage as they lost their grip on the chair. It might not have played out exactly like that, but he knew it was close enough to make no difference.
The floorboards groaned beneath his weight.
He walked toward the first of three doors, to the smallest bedroom. He couldn’t tell what color it had been painted in the moonlight, but a mobile with elephants and toucans and other exotic animals hung over a cot, and most of the floor was cluttered with cuddly toys and stuffed bears. There was no sign of the baby. That, he knew, was the only moment of blessed relief he was going to have until he left the house. He was well aware of the numbers: ninety percent of all kidnap victims were dead within thirty-six hours of being taken. There weren’t going to be any happy endings in this house.
There was a body on the bed in the next room. She lay sprawled out across the bed sheets. Her blood had turned them dark. Dark specks crawled across her face, stomach and legs: flies. They would have started laying their eggs in her already. In another day or two her flesh would be crawling with maggots.
Frost covered his nose and mouth and moved into the room. Up close, the stench made his eyes water.
She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been opened up. Twenty, thirty, forty cuts-it was impossible to tell where one entry wound ended and another began. They had sliced into each other and across each other. Frost didn’t want to think about the frenzy that must have driven the attack. No one deserved to die in so much pain. He looked at her lying on the bed, stripped of dignity as well as life. There was no way she hadn’t suffered. She’d been fighting and screaming through each and every knife thrust until her system shut down in shock.
All he could think was that she might have been beautiful once, but not anymore.
He looked at the ruin of flesh that had been a wife and mother nine days ago, and he wanted to break something.
He continued to walk around the room. For the sheer amount of violence there was very little out of place in the room. There was no sign of the baby. Was that the leverage they’d used against the guy to make him burn himself? Murdered his wife and kidnapped his baby? Or did he think they were both still alive? Did he think that by burning himself he was saving them?
Of course he did. How else did you keep a guy compliant? Kill his wife and he’s going to be thinking all the time about how to hurt you, how to turn on you, even if his child’s life depends on it, because he isn’t stupid. He knows that if you’ve killed one, you’ll kill the other as soon as he’s given you what you want. So no, the guy had to think his wife and child were safe. The poor bastard went to his death thinking he was buying their lives.
The woman’s mobile phone was on the bedside table. He tried to turn it on but the battery had discharged. He cracked it open and took the battery out so he could get at the SIM card.
Frost pressed his finger against the headset in his ear and triggered the call-home auto-dial. Lethe answered on the first ring.
“What do you need, boss?”
“Run the number on this SIM card for me, last call made, last one received.” He recited the three strings of numbers printed on the back of the card and waited while Lethe did his thing. It took a couple of minutes. In that time Frost looked around the room. Even discounting the body on the bed it was aterly sad room, white built-in wardrobes around the bed, from corner to corner and up to the ceiling. He opened a few of the cupboards and the night stand drawer. There was nothing particularly out of place in any of them, clothes and the junk of life shoved away in drawers to be forgotten about. She had been reading Agatha Christie. She’d never know who did it, Frost thought. He walked across to the window and looked out over the backyard. The word yard (in terms of grass and flowers and greenery) was a bit of a misnomer. It was a patch of cracked paving and unruly weeds fenced in by rotten wood that had been painted with brilliant white emulsion. The slats of wood looked like Papa Death’s rictus grinning up at him.