A Deadly Compulsion (25 page)

AT
the same time as Laura and Leo had run from the house, Hugh had got to his feet and limped past the open cellar door and into the kitchen.

Gone!  The Yank must have let her out before going upstairs.  But she was lost out there, probably hiding nearby.  He had not heard a car drive away.  He would have to find her, or he was finished.  His eyes locked on to the selection of knives; their dark ebony handles protruding from slots in the large wooden block that stood on the counter next to the bread bin.  He withdrew a long, thin-bladed boning-knife, immediately feeling stronger, as though a power radiated through the haft that he now gripped so tightly in his hand.  It was as if Elliott had ceased to exist.  His mind was blotting out all but a single line of thought at a time.  He walked out into the slanting, driving deluge slowly, mechanically, no longer feeling pain from his wounds, and with the blood diluted with rain and being washed from his body he made his way to the front of the house, and then stopped to look about him, determining where he would seek refuge in Laura’s position.

The barn doors were not closed to.  There was a vertical black line of shadow; a gap between them.  His mouth pulled up to the side in a crooked grin.  The stupid bitch had thought to hide in his personal abattoir, unaware that it was his alter of sacrifice, or that the ground it encompassed was filled with so many of his past victims.  She had brought him nothing but trouble.  Her living even long enough to be butchered at Cox’s place was no longer a consideration.  He would find her, tie her to the block, staple her fucking mouth shut, and cut her throat.  After that, her dead body would be bagged-up and transported to Cox’s house, where he would stage a macabre scene of murder and suicide.  Later, he would attend the scene again, when the corpses were discovered.  He would be there in an official capacity, to act suitably shocked and mortified at the atrocities committed on his boss.

Opening the right-hand barn door just wide enough to allow him to slip through, Hugh immediately moved to the side of it, into the shadows, to stand for a few seconds and give his eyes time to adjust to the low light.

Now disentangled from what had been Hugh’s mother, Jim scrambled over the top of the bed and reached down to pick up the knife that Parfitt had attacked him with.  The gas gun was not in sight, and he denied himself a few extra seconds to search for it, shuffling back across the bed, to step down to the floor and hear a sharp snap as he inadvertently put his foot through a brittle ribcage.  He jerked back, and then returned his attention to what his clearing mind appreciated might be the ace in the hole.

Looking along the gloomy length of the skirting board, he saw the two false eyes, three feet apart, staring out into the room.  The thumb, index and ring fingers of his right hand were numb; the result of the deep laceration that gaped open and streamed with blood, forcing him to put the knife on the floor while he retrieved the glass orbs with his left hand and forced them back into the sunken sockets.  Then, with the match stick corpse under his right arm, he retrieved the knife and set off in search of Hugh.

Who the fuck is that?  Hugh thought, watching the burly figure step down to the ground from the hayloft’s ladder, with Laura above him, carefully descending it a rung at a time.

Leo denied himself a repeat viewing of Laura’s attractive bare bottom, turning away from the vista of firm flesh, just in time to see the naked figure of a man running across the barn towards him.  And as he raised his arms in defence he knew that he was too late.  The glowering face, maniacal staring eyes, and the blur of shining steel were too close to allow for any evasive action.

The blade arced upwards, to enter his abdomen, sliding smoothly to the hilt.  Leo gasped as a sharp, paralysing pain made him double over.  Had he not known better, he would have believed that the cramping, crippling agony in his torso was the result of a sudden, massive heart attack.

Hugh put his right hand around the man’s neck, to pull him forward as if greeting an old friend, to then twist and wrench the weapon in all directions to cause as much internal damage as possible.  He worked the blade, – as his victim jerked and tried to pull away – only withdrawing it as the other man sank to his knees and ceased to struggle.

Hugh looked up to where Laura clung to the ladder.  The shuddering, moaning, dying figure at his feet was already dismissed from his mind.  He stepped over it and advanced.

Leo tasted warm blood in his mouth, coughed once and sprayed the air with crimson droplets.  He knew that he was dying; could feel a coldness creeping through him that he recognised as being a withdrawal of blood from his extremities; a last ditch attempt by his body to protect the major organs and preserve their functions.  Lying on his back, he was surprised that instead of experiencing fear, a spiritual revelation, or the vision of a benign figure calling to him, hand outstretched to lead him into a tunnel of scintillating white light, or whatever the hereafter might be, he found himself once more looking at Laura’s bottom as she hung high above him.  It was a truly delectable sight under the clinging hem of her Mickey Mouse nightdress.

Laura climbed back up, too fast, losing her footing and almost falling into the arms of what was no less than waiting death.  She somehow held on to the smooth rung, and with muscles stretched and burning, hauled herself back up into the loft, throwing the hatch down and searching in the straw for a catch or bolt to secure it.  There was no fastening, or any object she could see to employ and weight it down to keep him out.  With no alternative, she knelt on the trapdoor, hoping that her own soaking wet body on the hatch would be enough to keep him at bay. Unable to foresee any escape now, she felt trapped, vulnerable, and very alone.

As Hugh climbed the ladder with the blood-coated knife gripped between his teeth, a scene from his favourite childhood book popped into his mind:
Treasure Island
, and Israel Hands climbing the rigging of the Hispaniola, intent on murdering Jim Hawkins, who quaked above him in the crosstrees.

With neck and shoulder tight to the underside of the trap, he pushed upwards, straining every muscle, groaning with the effort, but driven by sheer determination and a flood of adrenaline that had surged through him as he ran across the barn to gut the man at the bottom of the ladder.  The wood creaked and raised an inch, then two.  Above, Laura felt herself being lifted and knew that her weight was not nearly enough to hold him back, as she began to slide down the rapidly increasing incline.

“You’re going to die, boss,” Hugh mumbled as the trap flipped back, dislodging Laura from it, to dump her in the straw on all fours.

She was between the devil and the deep blue sea, or more aptly, separated from the ground so far below her by a devil in human form.  She snatched a glance over the edge of the loft.  If she leapt down to escape Hugh, then in all likelihood she would break her ankles or sustain some other injury that would render her unable to move.  Better to just throw herself at him now, before he could climb the last couple of rungs and step on to what was in essence a boarded balcony. If they fell to earth together, then with a lot of luck, he may break her fall, and hopefully his neck, or choke on the blade of the knife that was clenched between his teeth, dripping Leo’s blood on to his chin, chest and stomach.

In the instant before she threw herself forward in a final attempt to survive, a voice split the near silence.

“Hey, shithead, look who I’ve got,” Jim shouted, entering the barn, looking up and seeing how close Hugh was to reaching Laura.

Hugh stopped, turned his attention to Jim and let the trapdoor drop back into place as he lowered himself part way down the ladder.

“Don’t hurt her,” Hugh wailed, snatching the knife from between his teeth as he saw a vision of his mother squirming in the grip of the American, who held a blade to her tender, milk-white throat.

Jim’s right arm encircled the corpse’s shoulders, and with his uninjured hand he pressed the sharp tip of the knife against the creased and leathery-brown skin.  “Drop the weapon and climb down, now, or I start cutting,” he said.

“You so much as graze her, and I’ll rip your fucking lungs out with my bare hands,” Hugh said as he obeyed and released the knife to let it tumble down onto the straw-covered floor of the barn.

Once that Hugh was back on the ground, he walked purposely towards Jim, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“That’s far enough,” Jim said, for a moment convinced that Hugh was too far gone to be able to hold back, even at what to him would be the certain death of his mother.  “Stop right there and sit on the ground.”  And to Laura, “Get down here, Laura, quick as you can.”

Laura almost collapsed with relief, at both Jim being alive and at what seemed a last minute reprieve from what she knew would have been the end of her.  In the low light, it appeared as though Jim was holding a bewigged dummy in front of him, but the absurdity of the situation was outweighed by the still dangerous position they were in.  She swung the trapdoor back all the way and scrambled down the ladder, giving Hugh a wide berth, even though he had now sat down and totally ignored her, his gaze and concentration firmly fixed on the mummified body that she could now see was what Jim held.

“In my pocket, left side,” Jim said as she reached him.  “Get my keys.  The car’s at the end of the drive, out on the road.  Bring it back here.”

Laura did not argue, just found the keys and ran from the barn, down the muddy track, hardly aware that the rain had stopped, and that a watery sun was lightening the slate-grey sky.

“Now what, Yank?” Hugh said, almost spitting the words out; hatred as cold as permafrost radiating from his bulging blue eyes.

“You get up slow and easy and back off, all the way to the far wall, and then sit down again.  When Laura gets back with the car, I let your mother go, and leave.”

“How do I know you won’t kill her?”

“Because you’re the sick bastard who gets off on killing helpless women.”

“Do what he says, son,” Jennifer Parfitt said, exclusively to Hugh.  “He hasn’t got the balls to hurt a defenceless woman, unless he has to.  He’ll keep his word.”

“Okay, Mummy,” Hugh said, slowly rising to his feet.

Jim felt a worm of revulsion and horror writhe in his brain.  Knew that Parfitt believed he was communicating with the mummified corpse.

Hugh walked stiffly backwards, not stopping until his back came up against the bleached and warped boards of the wall, where he slid down, to sit forlorn-looking, but generating no pity from Jim, who knew him for the heartless scum that he was.  Hugh Parfitt was the same as all the other countless serial killers that he’d profiled, back in the days when he had worked from a maze of offices sixty feet below the FBI Academy on the U.S. Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia.  As so many times before, he had put himself into the mind of a repeater murderer; had journeyed into the dark world where evil dwells.  Jim knew that they were all individuals; each and every one of them similarly twisted, but dancing to a different drum.  What they
did
all have in common was the same insatiable need to inflict suffering, both mental and physical; to dominate their victims and punish them for some wrong that they most likely imagined had been meted out to them by parents or the world in general.  This type lacked the capability to feel any compassion for humanity.  They might as well be of another species. Jim had once again evaluated and analysed the specifics of the crimes, and had developed a near perfect profile on the killer who would forever be labelled the Tacker.

Jim heard the car approaching.  He took three paces backwards to the partly open door, and as he did the bony feet of his inanimate hostage dragged along the ground, their long, curved, horny toenails parting straw and gouging furrows in the underlying soil.

Laura stopped outside the barn and opened the car window.  “Jim, he stabbed Leo,” she shouted, to be heard above the noise of the engine.  “He might still be alive.”

Jim looked across to where the PI lay almost hidden in the straw, unmoving, his body a rose madder hue from chest to thighs in the dim light.  Moving forward, not taking his eyes from Hugh, or the knife from his ‘salvation’s’ throat, he reached the body.  One glance was enough.  Leo’s eyes were open and glazed with the pupils fixed. His mouth was gaping and slack, dripping blood.  Across the front of his shirt, the bright red stain was still spreading like an animated Rorschach blot, which to Jim resembled an octopus, its tentacles unfurling over the slashed white cotton that covered the dead man’s chest.

Jim had an almost irrepressible urge to hack the head off the corpse he held, knowing that Hugh would hear his mother scream and see a phantom gout of blood rise from the stump of her neck as the head fell to the ground.  He wanted the maniac to suffer the torment that he so readily inflicted upon others.  And when Hugh then attacked him in an almost blind rage, he would stab the man repeatedly, not stopping until he collapsed with exhaustion, unable to raise his arm any more to plunge the knife into the psycho killer’s flesh.  Instead, he backed away towards the door and the light, then threw the lifeless husk across the floor and darted outside.  He fed the chain through the handles and secured the padlock, locking the one and only entrance and exit to the barn.

As Jim climbed into the passenger seat, Laura swung the wheel, reversed back across the farmyard past the black Mondeo and the front of the house, and then stopped a safe distance from the now imprisoned murderer.  She picked up Jim’s mobile and phoned the incident room direct, to give DC Neil Abbott brief details of the situation, her location, and telling him to get an Armed Response Unit and a paramedic team rolling as soon as she rang off.