Justice for the Damned (28 page)

Reece pulled up his t-shirt, exposing a cricket-ball-sized livid red mark on his left pec.

‘You’re gonna have one hell of a bruise.’ Doug wagged an admonishing finger. ‘You know, Reece, I’ve noticed something about you. You’re too bloody soft. One of these days it’s going to get you seriously hurt.’

‘Look, all I want to know is why I shouldn’t pack my bags and head for the nearest airport,’ said Reece, refusing to be deflected from his line of inquiry.

Doug tapped his temple. ‘Use your head. Do you really think I’d fuck with Reynolds if I didn’t have some serious muscle to back me up?’

Reece’s thoughts returned to the sign he’d seen on the gate of Porter’s house. ‘Steel City Security. Who are they?’

‘They’re me, along with some good friends of ours you’ll be meeting soon.’ Doug indicated the room around them. ‘As you’ve probably gathered, this is our little headquarters. A few years ago we started providing security for people who need it more than, shall we say, your average citizens.’ He illustrated his words by flipping open a box, revealing a CCTV camera cradled in polystyrene. ‘And it’s been a nice little earner. But we’re ready to expand now and go on to the next step. If you keep playing your cards right, you can come along for the ride too.’ He removed a couple of bundles of cash from one of the holdalls and proffered them to Reece. ‘There’s enough there to pay off your woman’s debt and have some left over.’

Reece motioned at the holdalls. ‘What about the rest of it? There’s got to be close to a million quid there.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the rest of your cut once it’s been divvied up. You’re part of an outfit now, and just like with the police, everyone in the outfit gets paid their dues.’

Reece accepted the cash. He stared at it. This was his future. This was Staci and Amelia’s future. And yet his eyes were troubled.

‘What have you got that look on your face for?’ said Doug. ‘You should be celebrating. You’re going to be a rich man. We both are.’ He clapped Reece on the arm. ‘I tell you, the way things are going for us, the people we’ve got in our pockets, we’re going to end up running this fucking city.’

He moved aside several boxes, revealing a man-sized safe, and punched a code into an electronic lock. As Doug stowed the holdalls in the safe, Reece caught a glimpse of more cash, a small arsenal of handguns and ammunition, and maybe half a dozen plastic-wrapped blocks of some light brown substance. Reece’s frown intensified.
Heroin!
His experienced eyes weighed up the blocks at around a kilo each. Depending on its purity, they had a wholesale value of around fifteen or twenty thousand pounds apiece. Of course, their street value was exponentially higher.

Reece’s hand strayed to the Glock in his jacket as his mind replayed the events of the past hour: Doug beating Porter; the screaming baby; the woman pulling out the gun.
You’re part of an outfit now.
He heard Doug’s words again, and with them came the thought,
You’re not a copper any more, not really. You’re a gangster.

His hands trembling with excitement, Edward fired up a petrol-run generator. A bulb flickered into life, dimly illuminating a rectangular concrete-floored room. In the centre of the room there were two sealed steel drums, a stack of bags of lye, and a couple of shovels and pickaxes. On the rear wall, an assortment of power tools and numerous plastic containers marked with skulls and crossbones occupied shelves attached to a wooden backing board. Edward pulled at one of the shelves. There was a click and the backing board swung smoothly outwards, revealing a second room.

This room was roughly half the size of the first and lit by a seedy red bulb. To the right of the concealed door there was a metal-framed bed with a pillow and a sleeping bag, to the left a fold-down camping table with a gas stove on it. Against the rear wall was a second set of shelves. At a glance their contents might have belonged to a survivalist preparing for Armageddon. But a closer inspection would have quickly revealed otherwise. Most of the shelves were stocked with bottled water, tinned and vacuum-packed food, gas canisters, pots and pans, toilet paper, a first-aid box, a pair of night-vision goggles and a couple of gas masks. One, though, was entirely given over to video tapes and DVDs, each with a name and date on it, running in chronological order from left to right; the earliest was marked ‘Roxanne Cole – 20/2/1980’. Two more shelves were crammed with almost every sex toy imaginable – dildos, whips, restraints, blindfolds, spanking paddles, nipple clamps, tubs of lube, leather gimp suits – as well as more sinister items like cattle prods, pliers and surgical knives. In front of the shelves stood a video camera on a tripod, and a wheeled TV stand with a video, a DVD player and a television on it.

But it was what was on the adjacent walls that identified the room as the lair of something monstrous. Thirty-seven photographs were stuck to the dirty-grey concrete. Like the videos and DVDs, each was marked with a name and date. The photos were mostly of young women. Several were of not yet, or just barely, pubescent girls. Those were Edward’s favourites. All the photos’ subjects were naked. And all of them appeared to be dead. Their eyes were open, but vacant. Their jaws were slack. As to the cause of their deaths, it didn’t take an expert to work out it hadn’t been natural. Their bodies were artworks of abuse, arranged to show off their cuts, bruises, ligature marks, burns, breaks, tears and missing body parts to maximum effect.

Any normal person would have been stopped dead in their tracks by this horrific installation. Edward barely afforded it a glance. He changed into a gimp suit and pulled on the night-vision goggles. As he’d done with the first set of shelves, he swung the backing board away from the wall, revealing a metal door with a horizontal glassed slit at head height. He peered through the slit into a third room about half the size again of the second. The only light inside the room seeped through the slit. A naked young woman was lying on a mattress. Her skin appeared a decayed green through the goggles. But she wasn’t dead. The yellow cuts of her eyes stared back at Edward. She knew from the light that she was being watched. He smiled, relieved. It had been Freddie’s turn with her the previous night. Freddie had promised not to finish her off, but sometimes he got carried away.

‘Hello, Melinda,’ Edward mouthed silently. He watched her for a while, enjoying the tremors of terrified anticipation that shook her skinny, battered body. Several times in the past he’d seen victims pass through their fear into a kind of numb hopelessness. When that happened, they were of no more use to him. Upon his last visit, it had seemed as if Melinda might be going that way. But now she appeared to have pulled back around.

Edward took off the goggles and drew back the bolts. A faint wrinkle of distaste crossed his face as he entered the tiny room. The stench of human waste hung heavy. But that wasn’t what bothered him. What bothered him was the way the red light accentuated the slight womanly curve of Melinda’s belly and breasts. Freddie knew what he liked. But what he liked wasn’t easy to get hold of. More often than not, he had to make do with girls like this one – the kind of slutty late-teens who populated ‘barely legal’ porn sites. Wendy Atkins’s timid, gullible face rose into his mind again. What he wouldn’t have paid to have a girl like her here. Or even a boy, he reflected, his thoughts turning fondly to Mark Baxley. But those kinds of opportunities appeared about as often as a comet in the sky. Kids like them simply didn’t exist on the streets his brother trawled for victims. Even when they were young enough to suit his tastes, someone else had always been there first, tainting their innocence, taking the edge off their vulnerability. As things stood, the only way to get hold of another Wendy Atkins or Mark Baxley – and not just for a few hours of fun, but for the rest of their short life – would be to snatch one from a garden, or a shopping centre, or some such thing. And the prisons were full of idiots who’d attempted that kind of nonsense.

Edward ground his teeth. For almost two years he’d been working on a project that, in the near future, would have provided the opportunities he desired. But this Grace Kirby business had thrown his plans into disarray. He sighed. He would just have to make the best of what he had. ‘How’s our guest doing today?’

Melinda made no reply. Even if she’d wanted to, she looked as though she barely had the strength to speak. Her face and body were a welter of bruises. Dried blood crusted her lips, abdomen and inner thighs. Her eyes were glazed and bloodshot with dehydration. Edward unscrewed a bottle of water and proffered it. She made no move to take it. ‘I’d drink something, if I were you,’ he said, setting it down at her side. ‘The body can survive for weeks without food, but only a few days without water.’

His lips curled upwards again as Melinda reached for the water. So she wasn’t quite ready to die yet. That was good. As she drank, he removed the bucket from the room. It was almost brimful with a toxic stew of piss and shit. He made a mental note to reprimand his brother. It was Freddie’s job to empty the bucket. Melinda stopped drinking when Edward moved the camera into position at the end of the mattress. Her tremors turned into body-racking shakes. ‘Assume the position,’ said Edward.

Melinda shook her head frantically.
Good
, thought Edward,
good!
He liked resistance. Not too much, but a little. He raised a cattle prod warningly. A sob filled Melinda’s mouth. She clamped her teeth together and swallowed it with a grimace. Then she managed to say a word, just one word, but it was enough. ‘No.’

Edward hit Melinda with the prod. She screamed, stiffening like some kind of macabre mannequin. He fastened leather restraints around her wrists and ankles, before straddling her waist. She briefly struggled to buck him off. Then she went limp and her eyes drifted away from his, seemingly staring at nothing. He whipped a hand across her cheek.

As if jerked out of a deep sleep, Melinda’s eyes darted back to Edward’s, wide with disorientated fear. That was all the encouragement he needed. He stooped and sank his teeth into her right nipple. He’d intended to take his time with her, but now that it came to it he couldn’t hold back. She screamed again as he chewed and tore at her flesh like a ravenous animal. Blood gushed hotly into his mouth. His own blood pumped hotly too, filling his groin to bursting. He groaned and twitched for a few seconds, then slowly drew himself back into a sitting position. He spat a bloody chunk of flesh into his palm. Her breath coming in strangled gasps, her eyes once again blank, beyond horror, Melinda stared at her severed nipple.

Edward displayed his prize to the camera. Then he rose and returned to the second room. Carefully, almost reverently, he removed a glass jar from the shelf. The jar was full of murky brownish liquid with numerous shrivelled scraps of skin floating in it like dead leaves. He unscrewed the lid and dropped the nipple into the liquid. He put the jar down and stepped back from it, head tilted and eyes narrowed, as if studying a piece of art. After a long moment, he picked up the first-aid box and turned his attention to Melinda. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t appear to be breathing. He checked for a pulse in her wrist and found one. He pulled up her eyelid. The pupil was dilated and sightless. She wasn’t playing dead. He took a wad of gauze out of the box and taped it over her mutilated breast. Not that he cared whether she bled to death, but there was no sense in letting the mattress get ruined. Besides, the actual killing part held limited interest for him. It was Freddie who had a thing about seeing the light go out in their eyes. It wouldn’t be fair to deny him that pleasure.

When Edward was done staunching the wound, he uncuffed Melinda, opened a tin of peaches and left them in a plastic bowl by the mattress. He liked to give them something sweet for their last meal. He didn’t intend to see her again. He’d taken all he wanted from her. The next time he visited the bunker, she would be sealed in a steel drum, marinating in Freddie’s special cocktail of chemicals. And after several months her gelatinous remains would be disposed of in the external grave pit. He closed the door, shot the bolts and swung the shelves back into position. He heated up a pan of water and scrubbed his face and hands with a soapy cloth. Then he changed into his clothes and headed for the front door. His hands were perfectly steady now as he turned off the chugging generator. He felt full, sated and relaxed, ready to take on the world.

Every few minutes, Jim was forced to adjust his position to ease the throbbing in his knee. His face was fixed into a grimace, and not just because of the pain. He kept thinking and trying not to think about what Forester might be doing. Was someone being killed in the bunker? Were they breathing their last breath right that minute? It was gut-wrenching to crouch there doing nothing with such questions swirling in his head. But what else could he do, unless he was willing to risk letting Forester slip through his fingers? What he was going to do when Forester emerged from the bunker was another question he didn’t have a satisfactory answer to. If he tackled Forester and found nothing incriminating, the result would ultimately be the same as if he’d called in Garrett. He needed to get a look inside the bunker without Forester’s knowledge.
But how?
he wondered.
Perhaps I can distract him somehow and sneak inside. It would be risky but what other—

Jim broke off from his line of thought as the wolfhound emerged from the trees at the far side of the clearing with a rabbit clamped between its jaws. It placed the rabbit on the ground and nuzzled it. The rabbit twitched and kicked out with its hind legs. The dog skittered away from it barking, then darted back in and snatched it up. It toyed with the rabbit for several minutes, then seemed to get bored with the game and started sniffing around the clearing. Jim adjusted his position again, ready to pop up and strike out should the dog catch his scent. The wolfhound nosed aside a patch of long brown grass, providing Jim with a glimpse of a low mound of ash. It pulled something out of the ash and began to chew on it. What the hell was it? A burnt chunk of wood? As the dog turned the object over in its paws, Jim’s eyes gleamed with sudden interest. No, it wasn’t burnt wood. It was a boot. A high-heeled boot.