The Meating Room (33 page)

She tried to still her pounding heart, stop her lungs from panting, as she placed the torch to one side, undid the ankle holster, and removed her gun. She shuffled across the floor, her back to the wall. If Magner made an appearance, she would shoot him stone dead. She tried to remember what Andy had done with Magner’s pistol and her mind drew a blank.

As her eyes probed into the darkness beyond the light of the main room, she realised that the entrance shaft was no longer illuminated. And as she worked out that Magner had escaped from the basement and closed the hatch, she heard the stuttering sound of the generator powering down.

The lights flickered, then died.

Jessie let out an involuntary whimper as darkness landed on her like a heavy weight. All of a sudden, her sense of direction evaporated. Was she staring blindly at the workbench, or was she looking off at an angle? And where had she left the torch?

She patted the concrete behind her. If she retraced her steps along the base of the wall, she would surely stumble across it. But she cursed herself for leaving it behind in the first place. Inch by careful inch, she edged her way back to the main room’s entrance. She caught the faintest shuffle of tiny claws on stones, the distant rustling of rats, the soft thud of fur on concrete as they tumbled from the wall and made their way into the blackness.

‘Dear God, help me,’ she whimpered.

* * *

Gilchrist reached the end of the tunnel – another metal door.

If it was locked, he could do nothing but retreat. He reached for the handle – identical to the one at the other end – and pressed it down.

The lock clicked.

To his surprise, this door opened wide enough on the first pull for him to slip through without difficulty and step into what appeared to be another tunnel. He held his mobile out in front again, worried that the screen might fade at any time – how long did these things last anyway? He had already taken longer than expected.

This tunnel was wide enough for one person. It had a concrete floor, but the low ceiling made walking upright impossible—

The walls lit up like an explosion.

Gilchrist’s body jerked as if shot. He managed to hold on to his mobile, but had to squeeze his eyes against the sudden brightness.

‘Don’t move.’

The voice came from behind and hit him like a rabbit punch to the neck.

He spun around.

Magner crouched at the foot of a wooden ladder that reached to the tunnel ceiling and the inviting opening of a cottage trapdoor. His face was bloodied and bruised, his jaw twisted at an odd angle. His bloodshot eyes glared at Gilchrist, twin blistered slits of red. If utter vitriol had a look, this was it. And it struck Gilchrist with a flutter of surprise that Magner handled a shotgun every bit as smoothly as Purvis did.

‘Drop the phone.’ The shotgun barely twitched.

Myriad questions blasted through Gilchrist’s mind with the power of a tornado. How had Magner broken free? Where was Jessie? Was she alive? Where were Purvis and Mhairi? Had the backup arrived? And how the hell had he fucked up so badly?

‘The phone,’ Magner reminded him.

Gilchrist threw it towards Magner’s feet, where it landed with a clatter.

As nonchalant as you like, Magner lowered the shotgun and let off one barrel. The mobile exploded, sending pieces of plastic and metal ricocheting off the tunnel’s walls and ceiling. Somewhere a light bulb popped and the tunnel dimmed as glass tinkled to the floor. Gilchrist shielded his eyes as shrapnel stung his face. Still, if he could take any heart from the moment, it was that Magner had only one shot left.

As if to confirm Gilchrist’s thoughts, Magner dropped his left shoulder and slipped a strap off it, which materialised into a rifle that he pointed at Gilchrist’s head. A quick check confirmed that Magner had only the rifle and shotgun, although from where Gilchrist stood it was impossible to tell if he had his SIG Sauer on him.

The barrel wiggled – an instruction for Gilchrist to move.

‘Turn around,’ Magner ordered, his voice slurred through his broken jaw.

‘You’re only making matters worse,’ Gilchrist said.

Magner kept the rifle steady. ‘I’m thinking they can only get better from now on.’

It looked to Gilchrist that Magner would smile if he could, and he slowly turned his back to him, knowing that any second now he would be shot through the back of the head.

‘On your knees.’

Gilchrist did as instructed, taking his time, his survival instinct fighting to eke out every last second of his life.

‘I should have killed you back there,’ Magner said. ‘Killed all three of you.’

‘Don’t do this—’

‘
Shut up
.’

Gilchrist held up his hands, shoulder high. ‘I’m unarmed.’

‘I said shut
the fuck
up.’

Gilchrist closed his eyes, and took his last breath.

The rifle shot snapped like a whip-crack.

Jessie struggled to fight off a searing flare of panic that engulfed her like a boiling wave. Her breath pulled in and out in sharp hits that burned her throat. In the pitch black, and hyperventilating, she lost all sense of direction, and found herself struggling even to determine what was up and what was down.

Without the wall at her back, she was certain she would have toppled over.

She crawled through the darkness, her shoulders brushing the concrete, one hand sweeping the floor – dust, stones, fluff, hard bits of something that had her throat gagging at the thought of what they might be. She reached the point where the torch should be and swept her arm in a wide arc, fingers tapping, probing, until she touched—

She screamed, withdrew her hand with a primal gasp, and wiped the stickiness of Stan’s blood from her fingers. Her lungs choked then, and she could do nothing to stop the surge of bile that erupted from her mouth in spluttering vomit that threatened to take her breath away for good. But she sucked in air, and sat there in blinded horror as a spasm shuddered through her system to compete with her sobbing.

She did not know how long she sat there crying – one minute, twenty? – but she finally forced herself to take deep breaths and tried to steady her nerves. Her night-vision, too, had improved to the point where she could make out shadows – dark on black – but nothing more definitive. Grey walls stood next to darker openings. Things on the floor seemed to scuttle and shift. The workbench, with its monitor and butcher’s tools, was a lighter shade of black.

Jessie shuffled on to her hands and knees, reached forward, keeping away from the dark shadow she knew was Stan’s body, and swept the floor again with one hand. She patted around in a methodical manner, a one-eighty in front of her, then extended her arm through another arc. On the third sweep her fingers touched the rubber casing of the torch, and she let out a cry of relief.

With shivering hands and clumsy fingers, she clicked the switch.

The pitch blackness evaporated into greys through which the beam cut like a knife of light. Shadows shrank away to reveal walls, workbenches, open doorways, and beyond . . . her escape route to the entrance shaft.

She rose to her feet and tightened her grip on both torch and Beretta.

Each unsteady step forward took her closer to the ladder and away from the Meating Room, with its horrific sculptures, away from Stan’s stiffening body, away from a pervading fear that had squeezed the air from her lungs and shaken her to the bone.

With each step, she felt as if she were shedding another layer of terror.

By the time she reached the ladder, her hopes were soaring.

She put the torch in her pocket and the Beretta back in its ankle holster. Then she gripped the handrail and pulled herself up rung by rung until she reached the closed trapdoor. She felt for the hinges, then pushed up at the other edge. Locked. But she recalled what the lock looked like – nothing more than a sliding metal latch – then reached down to her ankle, and retrieved the Beretta.

She pressed the muzzle hard against the hatch, turned her head, and pulled the trigger.

Wood and metal tore apart with a splintering bang.

A thump upwards with the heel of her hand and the trapdoor crashed open.

Jessie pulled herself out, grabbed her torch from her pocket, and walked through the anteroom into the barn. The Rottweiler lay dead on the concrete floor in front of the BMW – Magner had not driven off. She stepped around the dog’s body, brushed past the car, and switched her torch off as she neared the door.

Outside, the cottage’s windows shone like a line of beacons, as if all was in order.

‘Right, you fucker,’ Jessie whispered. ‘You’ve asked for it.’

Gilchrist felt the hot buzz of the bullet zip past his left ear, heard it ricochet off the tunnel’s wall in the distance. Then his stomach spasmed at the clicking sound of the rifle’s bolt action behind him, and the metallic tinkle of the empty cartridge as it bounced off the floor.

It took all of his willpower not to wet himself.

The first shot was to scare him. The second would kill him.

He thought of just getting to his feet, putting up a fight.

‘That was a warning,’ Magner said. ‘To stay put.’

Relief flooded through Gilchrist. Without both hands on the floor, he would have collapsed. He flexed his fingers, tried to calm his nerves, and forced his mind to work beyond the fear. His ears pricked at the sound of feet on wood behind him, then the electronic beep of a call being made.

‘Got him,’ Magner said. ‘Be with you in fifteen,’ followed by a grunt and a heavy echoing thud as the cottage trapdoor slammed shut.

Gilchrist struggled to work through the rationale.

Magner had said he should have killed all three of them back in the Meating Room, yet had just passed up the perfect opportunity to execute Gilchrist.

Which meant?

The situation had changed in some way . . .

With Stan dead, and the police closing in, Magner’s whole game plan had changed.

He would not be going to court to defend himself against the rape charges. Having killed Stan, he would now have to flee. And his best chance of doing that was to keep Gilchrist alive and use him as a bargaining tool. Gilchrist could only hope that Purvis had captured Mhairi for the same reason.

‘Get up,’ Magner said.

Gilchrist struggled to his feet, bumped his head against the low ceiling, and hunched his shoulders in a stooping stance.

‘Start walking.’

Gilchrist placed one unsteady foot in front of the other. The rifle barrel prodded his back, instructing him to speed up. So he did, but not too fast. Magner’s call to Purvis told Gilchrist he had fifteen minutes to try to work out how to prevent himself and Mhairi from being killed, as well as finding the answer to a few puzzling questions.

So he started with, ‘It took me a while to figure it out.’

‘Shut it.’

‘Walking helps me think, and thinking makes me talk,’ Gilchrist tried. He knew he was taking a chance, but no response suggested that Magner might let him continue, just for the hell of it. But the echo of Magner’s voice –
be with you in fifteen
– told Gilchrist that as long as he was walking and talking, he was safe. Well, as safe as you could be with a loaded rifle and shotgun two steps behind you.

He took another chance with, ‘It always amazes me how the smallest things bring you down. The one thing you overlooked.’

Silence.

‘It was the cut on your hand that gave you away. At the initial interview. You’re left-handed. But your partner in crime isn’t, you see?’

Magner gave a non-committal grunt.

‘So it got me thinking, that maybe you’d cut yourself hacking poor Amy to bits.’

The rifle jabbed the nape of his neck, more instruction to speed up than stop talking, and made Gilchrist think it might be more prudent to be less direct.

‘No one remembers talking to you on Thursday afternoon at the Highland Hotel,’ he said. ‘Because Jason was standing in for you. You look alike, but not close up, so he had to stay in your room for most of the afternoon, then swap places when you returned some time during the conference that night.’ He stopped, took a breath. ‘It’s hard going down here. Not much air.’ He waited for another prod from the rifle, but when it never came, he knew Magner was finding the going just as difficult.

He pressed on, walking and talking. ‘And here was me thinking Jason was the one who cut up the bodies, disembowelled them, chopped off their heads, ripped out their hearts and guts – all the stuff he needs for his artwork. But it was you all along—’

‘You know the square root of fuck all.’

‘And artwork?’ Gilchrist said. ‘I mean, that’s pushing the boat out. But it does make for an interesting concept. Whose idea was it to protect your tokens with wire mesh?’

Nothing but the hard rush of deep breaths behind him.

Gilchrist counted thirty steps until they reached a ninety-degree corner. They rounded it and he worked out that they must be under the main road that fronted the cottage. The ceiling was even lower here, and he had to stoop and shuffle forward with bended knees and thigh muscles that burned with pain. Magner was as tall as Gilchrist – six-one – but not as slim, so Gilchrist knew he must be finding it difficult, too. He slowed down a touch, but another prod in the back assured him that Magner was handling progress in the cramped space perfectly well.

‘We checked CCTV footage of the park,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Tentsmuir Forest. It’s busy, even at this time of year. Dog-walkers, hikers, fitness fanatics, and the like. We have a Ford Focus that matches the one parked outside Cauldwood Cottage entering at ten to eight. But by then, you’d already killed Amy and the kids, and I’m guessing you had Amy’s body parts wrapped in towels in the boot.

‘I’d also guess that Amy told Janice that she’d filed a complaint against you for rape under her maiden name – Charlotte Renwick. Or maybe their other sister, Siobhan, told Janice. Either way, you’d reached breaking point. The game was up. When Janice phoned you yesterday, that sealed her fate, too. So you and Purvis killed her – just as you’d killed Nichola Kelly, all those years ago.’