‘I’m waiting.’
Jessie dropped her mobile to the floor.
‘Step to the side and turn around.’
Something in the cold finality of his words caused Jessie to picture the man steadying himself and aiming the gun straight at her head. She raised both hands in the air. ‘I’m unarmed,’ she said to the darkness. ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘Turn around.’
Jessie wondered why he was so insistent when he could see her clearly. The only logical answer was that he was going to shoot her. She tried to reason with him. ‘My son’s deaf,’ she said. ‘He needs me.’
‘I said turn around.’
‘Please.’
‘Last chance.’
Jessie swallowed the lump in her throat, and shuffled around. Every nerve in her body was jumping, while her mind tried to reassure her that she was not about to die. The sound of shoes – or boots – crunching over the dust and dirt sent a wild flash of panic through her and her heart into overdrive, thudding in her chest like some caged animal kicking to free itself.
She did not want to die.
Leather scraped concrete.
Closer now. Too close. As if…
The footsteps stopped.
Silence, save for the rush of her breath and the frenzied beating of her heart.
She could feel his presence now, sense he was leaning closer.
Making sure he could not miss-
Her world exploded in a blast of white light.
CHAPTER 34
Gilchrist tilted his head to the ceiling. To his side, Stan stirred from unconsciousness with a long groan, as if he had caught it too – the momentary stutter of the generator’s engine in the barn above, which caused the lights in the basement to flicker.
‘We have company,’ Purvis announced.
Gilchrist risked taking another hit from the shotgun’s stock by turning his head and saying, ‘Magner?’
Purvis smiled down at him. ‘Clever you.’
As Gilchrist’s mind flashed back to that first interview with Magner, the cut on the base of the thumb, the question – you’re left-handed? – he saw where he had made the most basic of errors, stunned into silence that not one of them had picked up on it. CCTV footage of the Highland Hotel – on the night Brian McCulloch was seated in his Jag in Tentsmuir Forest, supposedly committing suicide after having murdered his entire family – and Magner standing in the hallway outside the conference room, about to enter, mobile phone in hand, powering it down – and all of it done with his mobile in his left hand, while he prodded at the keypad with his right.
‘You stood in for him,’ he said.
Purvis cocked his head, a silent question in his eyes.
‘The conference in the Highland Hotel. It wasn’t Magner. It was you that night.’
Purvis grimaced as he stared down at Gilchrist, as if deciding whether to hit him with the stock of the shotgun again, or blast him with both barrels. It took him two seconds to choose the former, and he stepped forward and thudded the gun into Gilchrist’s face.
Gilchrist had time only to turn away, take the blow to the side of the head. Even so, the hit sent a flash of light through his brain, and he grunted with surprise as the concrete floor rose up to meet his face with a grit-laden slap.
The next second – well, it felt as if it was the next second, although he failed to see how he had missed Magner’s entrance – Gilchrist rolled on to his back, confused for a moment as to where Purvis had gone. The skin by his left eye felt thick and sticky to the touch, as he struggled to focus. Another dab at the side of his head had him wincing with pain, trying to gauge the extent of the wound through hair clotted with blood and dust. And Jessie was here, too, seated on the concrete floor beside Stan, their backs to the wall. He struggled to push himself upright, which caused Magner to stride towards him, and glare down at him.
‘You’re a silly man,’ Magner said. ‘Persistent, I have to give you full marks for that, but silly.’
If Gilchrist could have spoken, he would have agreed. Silly sounded about right. He had been silly not to arrest the bastard sooner; silly not to see how the resemblance between Magner and Purvis was crucial to the case; silly to have led Stan and Jessie into this basement. He would have agreed with all of that, but his tongue had glued itself to the roof of his mouth, and all he could do was shake his head in silent acknowledgement of his abject silliness.
Magner held up a mobile, which Gilchrist recognised as his own. ‘Been looking through all your Call Logs, and it’s good to see that not one of you called for back-up.’
Oh, that, too. He was silly for not calling for back-up; silly to think that he and Stan could have gone it all alone. But not silly, really, when you thought about it. Just stupid.
Downright fucking stupid.
‘We didn’t need to call for back-up,’ Gilchrist said, working spittle into his mouth, ‘because they already know where we are.’
‘Really?’
‘If we don’t check in, they’ll send uniforms to the cottage. They’re probably already on their way.’
‘On a Sunday night?’ Magner sounded incredulous.
‘Never heard of twenty-four/seven?’ Jessie said. ‘That’s the constabulary for you.’
‘Every day a working day. Is that it?’ Magner’s smile evaporated the instant his lips curled.
The clanging of metal on metal had everyone turning their heads towards the access ladder. Light shone through the shaft, revealing Purvis working his way down, rung by rung, into the basement.
Gilchrist counted twenty-seven steps from the foot of the ladder to Purvis standing in front of him, and noticed for the first time that he was dressed in camouflage gear. Magner, on the other hand, was wearing a dark blue suit and a white shirt with a red tie. A matching handkerchief poked from his top pocket.
Purvis took one step closer to Gilchrist.
The kick to his chest took Gilchrist by surprise, the power behind it staggering. For one frightening moment his world turned black again, and he thought his heart had stopped.
‘That’s for killing Bruce,’ Purvis gasped.
Gilchrist’s system came to with a grunt. He sucked in air and winced from the fresh pain.
‘Bruce was one of Jason’s dogs,’ Magner explained.
‘I thought psychos didn’t like pets,’ Jessie quipped. ‘Cruelty to animals, and all that.’
Purvis gave her a look that could have boiled the air between them. But Magner raised his hand and Purvis took a couple of steps back, distancing himself from Jessie, as if not trusting his right boot. If looks could speak, Purvis was telling Jessie just how high over the crossbar he was going to punt her.
‘You’ve put us in a dilemma,’ Magner said. ‘What should we do with you?’
‘I know what to fucking do with them,’ Purvis countered. ‘Turn them into dog food.’
Another raised hand from Magner shut Purvis down, and told Gilchrist who was in charge. But he also knew that no matter who was pulling the strings, the situation could end only one way, with one of them – likely Purvis – pulling the trigger.
He glanced into the darkness, where the lights failed to reach, at sarcophagal chambers that resembled square mouths to dark caves, in each of which dangled skeletal wire-mesh cages that housed human artefacts. Or, as Gilchrist’s numbed mind came to understand, symbolic tokens from each kill, prizes to be treasured or fondled, through which the killer – read killers – could relive that glorious moment of ultimate pleasure, when they watched the light of life in each of their victims flicker, then die.
Purvis turned to the workbench and reached for something. When he turned back, the sight of the shotgun turned Gilchrist’s blood to ice.
‘My son needs me,’ Jessie pleaded.
‘You should’ve thought of that before you became a cop,’ Purvis said, shouldering the gun.