The Death Collector (44 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hunter and Weaver were at Declan Farrell’s house not long before I went in and found Carl Jex tied up in a cellar,’ Joe said. ‘They gave Declan an ultimatum of an hour. It sounds like it was a warning to Declan that he had to leave, and we know he isn’t coming back. He’d booby-trapped the house, set the gas taps going. If we hadn’t been there, the whole house would have gone up.’

‘What, and you think Hunter and Weaver are involved in all of this?’ Evans said, her eyes wide.

‘I know they are, but I don’t know why. All I know is that they’re trying to stop one of their prize scalps turning sour, because it all comes back to Aidan Molloy. The person in that house had ingratiated himself with Mary Molloy. He didn’t use his real name, but I think he’s the man who killed Rebecca Scarfield, not Aidan Molloy, and Hunter and Weaver don’t want it coming out.’

‘But why the hell would it matter?’ Evans said.

‘Because Hunter altered the evidence to make it fit Aidan Molloy. The killer of the assistant chief’s daughter getting away with it? He’d never live it down.’

‘There was a lot of pressure to get someone for that,’ Evans said.

‘So Hunter got too keen, and now he can see all his hard work unravelling.’

Evans held up Sam’s phone. ‘But what about this? Who sent this text?’

‘I’m guessing that it’s Declan Farrell. Otherwise it’s too coincidental. David Jex had been following the same trail we have, and I think at some point he realised they had got the wrong man in Aidan Molloy.’

‘And then Jex went missing,’ Evans said, her eyes narrowed, her voice quiet, as if her mind was trying to join up the dots, except that it kept on making a picture she couldn’t accept as being correct. ‘But why is it so important to whoever has got Alice that Hunter and Weaver spill some secret?’

‘I don’t know that part, but we should ask,’ Joe said, and he jabbed his finger towards the phone in her hand. ‘He has Alice.’

Evans’s gaze hardened. ‘There’s no
we
here,’ she said. ‘This is police business.’

‘Look, I’ve seen what this man can do. Carl tied up, his head in a noose, and a corpse lying at his feet. This is my family’s business, and if you shut me out, I’ll get in touch with a reporter – a real one this time – and I’ll tell them what we saw. You’ll all be tainted then, as if all you’re interested in is looking after one of your own.’

‘Don’t threaten me,’ Evans said, her voice rising a notch.

‘It’s no threat,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a promise that I will do the right thing, one way or another. You have to decide which side you want to be on when it all goes public.’

‘It’s not about sides,’ Sam said angrily. ‘It’s about getting Alice back.’

Joe turned to him. ‘I know that, Sam, but over the last few days I’ve got the feeling that your colleagues don’t quite see it that way.’

‘All right,’ Evans snapped, her hand in the air. ‘We go in there, but remember that they are still senior police officers, and you’re in a police station.’

Joe looked at Sam, who nodded. Joe was happy with that. If Sam trusted Evans, then so would he.

Sam pushed at the door to the Incident Room. Hunter turned round, Weaver too. Hunter paled and sat down.

Declan Farrell looked around at the darkness.

It was a different kind. Not that eye-straining glow you get in the cities, where every street is picked out in murky orange, so that nothing is private but nowhere is clear. This darkness was complete; where even the bright dots of stars were only decoration, the speckled blanket untroubled by the light pollution a few miles away, the vivid dots of white only obscured when the rise and fall of the landscape made the horizon uneven, never enough to guide or illuminate.

It was reassuring. It gave him refuge from those who were pursuing him, and he knew they would be. This was the end, or at least a new beginning, the one he knew would come. He was going to do what he always did: spread some pain to those who had hurt him.

They were in the ruins of an old cottage, high on the moors, now just a frame of grey stone, with an open doorway and two empty windows, with wooden struts across the top. It meant they were hidden, his little secret, but it meant much more than that. He had been here before. Too often. The ground was easy to dig into, the peat soil soft and untroubled by tree roots. He had learned that from watching his father dig there, angry thrusts of the spade into the dirt, sweat sticking his shirt to his back, his gasps of breath filled with desperation, fear almost, but it hadn’t stopped him.

He closed his eyes and she was with him again. His mother. She was always there when he visited, as if her body stained the walls but only he could see it. It was an outline of her body slumped against the wall, dragged there by his father. It had been done with his help, propped underneath the open square of what was once a window, a view towards dark spurs of moorland that followed the trail of a stream that headed to the reservoir in the valley below.

His father had dug a hole for her, but it was in the corner, because people don’t dig in the corner when they search. They go for the centre each time, so he knew she wouldn’t be found, forever their secret. That’s what he’d said, that if people found out they would lose everything. He’d lost his mother. He couldn’t lose his father too.

So he spent time up here, keeping the derelict cottage standing, like putting the stones back when they fell away and spreading branches and moss across the roof rafters to keep some of the rain out. He couldn’t allow her resting place to become a swamp, the soil washed away to let the spindles of her fingers poke through the grass and nettles that were taking over. As much as he tried to stop it, the cottage was being reclaimed by the land, a little more crumbling each year.

The others weren’t there, the ones he had brought. No one else had been buried there, not even his father. They were all out there somewhere, under the peat soil and clumps of grass and the stars, the ones who thought they could say goodbye. No one leaves, he had told them that. So he had given them back to nature, bestowed on them the freedom of the open moorland.

It had been different when it came to his father’s time. That had been so that he was never reunited with his mother. His mother had left his father for good, kept apart for eternity. Declan wasn’t going to reunite them in death.

It had been one last taunt that had consigned him to an unmarked grave, dragged long into the night so that Declan wouldn’t remember where he had dug. Forever abandoned.

His father had screamed in his face once too often, berating him, whisky spittle flying from his mouth. It brought back how he had been with her, one final reminder of why she should have left, got out of their poisonous union. But his father shouldn’t have done it at the top of the stairs.

One push was all it took, his father’s arms wheeling, suspended almost, his heels against the top step, and then he started tumbling, rolling, his head cracking against the steps. Something snapped as he landed, splayed on the floor like a puppet with cut strings.

Declan looked upwards towards the sky again, visible through the holes in the roof, most of it gone, except where he kept it covered over his mother. It looked like the stars had moved, as if they were being turned like a loose lid over the vast spread of the moors. It should have been idyllic, lost in the memories of his revenge, but he knew that everything had changed, that he had to either end it that night or move on and start again.

A sound disturbed his thoughts. Whimpers, pathetic and small. He turned round. Alice was against a wall, underneath where there was still some roof cover, most of it crumbled to rotting beams covered in moss, so that she couldn’t be picked out by the infrared camera if they sent up the force helicopter.

This was different. It was pure revenge against someone who had never turned away from him. Alice wasn’t the target of his revenge. She was the means, the tool, nothing more, but this was different, because it was goodbye too, to his life. Time to start over.

He trudged over and knelt in front of her. He cocked his head close to hers. He smiled, although he knew he was all in shadow.

‘Poor little Alice,’ he whispered. He reached out to move some stray hairs from her face, but she flinched and pulled away, the only protest she could muster. ‘You know he will suffocate you, don’t you? That good man of yours, Sam, the perfect husband, the one who catches bad people. You’ll stay with him, and everything about you that is special will disappear. Your vibrancy, your fun. It will get sucked away by his needs. Ironing shirts, cooking meals, doing what you see as your duty. What about the other stuff? In bed? Is that duty now? Just enough to keep him from straying, but what about you?’

Alice shook her head. Tried to talk behind her gag, but it came out muffled.

‘You’ll never leave, will you? You promised to stand by him. Bravo.’ And he put his finger under her chin and tilted her head upwards. He got closer and whispered, ‘Will he get me?’ He shook his head slowly and dramatically, his bottom lip out in a pout. ‘I don’t think so, do you?’

Her tears glistened despite the darkness, silvery salty tracks, her cheeks streaked with dirt. She shivered in her sweatpants and T-shirt.

‘You know what will hurt him the most?’ he said, as he straightened. ‘Not knowing where you are, so that he can’t give you a proper burial. He will spend every spare moment up here, walking over these moors, a spade in his hand, digging in places where he thinks you might be.’

Alice shook her head, her eyes clamped shut, her whimpers turning into muffled shrieks.

‘He’ll think he knows. He’ll work out where the signal from your phone is, but that can only identify the nearest mast, and even then it will get bounced somewhere else if it’s being overused, so it is only ever a guess. It still leaves the whole of the moors to cover. And he’ll do that, because he loves you, walking the moors, looking, digging, but he’ll never find your last resting spot. It’s the start of your journey, as the earth pulls you around until eventually there is nothing left of you to find.’

He leaned forward to kiss the top of her head. She pulled away again, but he just laughed. ‘I thought you needed it more than me.’

Alice didn’t move as he stepped away out of the cottage, swinging his spade in his hand. He whistled, he knew it would upset her, and then stamped at the ground a few yards away, thinking about where the others were. Once he was satisfied that he had a good patch of virgin burial soil, he raised the spade high and thrust it hard into the ground.

Sam marched straight up to Hunter.

‘Tell us your secret,’ he said.

Hunter’s eyes flickered wide, just for a moment, but Sam noticed something else too: the process of information, a flickbook through all of his secrets and wondering where something was going to come back and hurt him.

‘What do you mean?’ Hunter said, but his voice was hoarse. His tongue darted onto his lip. Weaver sat in a chair and slumped against a desk.

Sam struggled to contain his panic, his concern for Alice taking over everything. ‘What do you think it means?’ he said, an angry tremor audible. ‘Someone has got my wife.’

‘What has this got to do with me?’ Hunter looked at Weaver. ‘With us?’

‘Where have you been this evening?’ Sam said.

Hunter flushed. ‘I don’t like your tone.’

Evans rested her palm against Sam’s chest. He looked at her, and she nodded at him slowly.
Calm down. Don’t make it an attack
.

Hunter looked surprised when Evans said, ‘It’s a reasonable question, sir. Did you visit Declan Farrell earlier?’

Hunter’s jaw dropped open. His nostrils flared as he weighed up whether to tell the truth or hide behind some bluster.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘He said he had some information, but it turned out he didn’t. We left. Why?’

‘Half an hour after you left, so did he,’ Evans said. ‘When the house was searched, Carl Jex was found in the cellar, a noose around his neck, and a woman was naked and dead on the floor.’

Hunter put his head in his hands. Weaver groaned and put his head back.

Sam took a deep breath, making Hunter look at him.

‘Do you know why I dug up the moor and found David Jex?’ Sam said, stepping closer. ‘Do you remember me telling you? X marked the spot was what I said, except you wouldn’t listen to me, and let the scene get trampled to hell. Why would you do that?’

‘We play the odds, you know that,’ Hunter said, but his voice was fainter, as if he was losing some of his fight.

‘But the dead woman, carved up like that, laid out like that, was a sign to go looking for David Jex. Now it looks like whoever killed her and left her over the shallow grave of David Jex kept his son captive. And you were there. You were at the house, and you did nothing.’ Sam took a deep breath as tears of anger began to flow. He jabbed Hunter in the chest. ‘And now he has Alice.’

Hunter looked at the floor. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I got a text, telling us that Alice comes home if you tell us your secret!’ Sam shouted, not caring about Hunter’s rank. ‘It was from Alice’s phone.’ He took it back from Evans. ‘I’m going to call that number and find out why you’re so important.’ Sam pressed redial, but all he got was the unavailable tone. He looked at Evans, his eyes wide, panic rising.