Unraveled Visions (A Shaman Mystery) (35 page)

I needed to get out of here. I had to get out of the kitchen and escape through the yard, but I didn’t have the strength to stand and run. Grace might return from the spirit realm with a different view of the world, but I could not be sure, so I kept a firm grip on the scalpel as I began the slow struggle to my feet.

“What the fuck is going on?”

I’d been so busy keeping Grace in my sights that I failed to see Stan arrive. Of course he’d heard the screams. Perhaps he thought at first they were my screams. That had given me a little extra time, but not long enough.

“Stan.” I wasn’t sure he’d understand me. My voice was warped like heated plastic. “Stan …”

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” Stan gave the doctor a useless kick with the point of his shoe. He looked at me and his face narrowed. His eyes were slits of yellow, and a thin fang showed as he snarled. It was the cocktail stick he was chewing.

I started to move; a hunched and hobbling sort of limp. I needed to keep the nimble Stan on the other side of the maze of kitchen units. I concentrated on putting each foot in front of the other, holding onto surfaces as I progressed towards the lobby door. My hand rested on green cotton and I pulled until the sterile instruments and containers crashed to the ground.

“You bitch!” Stan was in front of me. “What the fuck did you do to him? I’ve had it with you.” He actually laughed. He shouldered me up against the fridge door and held me there with the bend of one arm. “You pissed me off from the get-go,
Sabbie Daar
.” He put his free hand over my bare breast and squeezed until he saw me react from the pain. The hand slid down over the wetness of my stomach, where Grace had smeared the antiseptic. I could smell his breath, sour like he often forgot dental hygiene. He pulled back his lips, as if to prove the point. The cocktail stick was gripped between his front teeth, the point sticking out. He bobbed his head towards my cheek. This was Stan’s sort of kiss. Tiny pricks of pain with each one.

He spoke through clenched teeth. “You need to be wasted. Fast. No more trouble from you. Fucked … then wasted.”

He brought his face down upon my neck. He thrust and ground his hips into me, pushing me hard into the door of the fridge. The point of the cocktail stick went into my skin. I gasped.

Or Stan did.

I thought I’d gasped from the mean little pain he inflicted. But it was Stan; a single gasp, like the hiss of a snake.

His grip loosened. He reeled backwards. His face was wide with surprise—eyes, mouth, everything forming circles of shock. He didn’t speak. His hands were at his stomach. Around his fingers, redness welled. The bright colour ran over his hands but he didn’t move them. They were holding something that protruded from above the waistband of his jeans. Something pencil-thin and silver.

I couldn’t work it out. The sludge in my brain stopped me understanding.

The scalpel clattered onto the floor and instantly the wound began to gush. The blood was running through his fingers over his jeans and down his legs. Stan stumbled towards the sinks and grabbed at a clean tea towel, pressing it into the wound. I heard him suck in breath and whimper, just once.

I started to edge away. My legs gave way as I felt the touch of a hand on my bare skin of my back. I swung round, panting. It had to be Grace, awake and on his feet.

Mirela stood motionless behind me, her pupils liquid black. We gripped each other. Our bodies swayed. We were both drugged. She had lost most of her clothes. I had lost all of mine.

Stan roared with anger and we turned to face him, as though mesmerised. He put out his bloodied hand. I could read his mind. Two birds, in his kitchen. Both for the pot. Our minds were too slow and our bodies too feeble to fight back or even attempt to run. But his legs were sodden with his own blood. His body doubled over, grabbing the sink for support with a hand slippery with blood.

Mirela squealed. “One! two!” When I looked at her, I saw her eyes had a bright sharp focus. Her breathing was steady. Her hand squeezed my arm. It was a signal.

“One! two!”

We moved in perfect synchronization. Stan saw us coming. “Bitches,” he barked.

We reached him. I took a fist of that floppy hairdo. Mirela punched at his shoulder. Between us, we took him down to the floor. His head went back and I heard the crack as it hit the cold ceramic tiles.

Lying there, Stan turned into a waxen image of himself. I was torn between running for my life and staunching his bleeding. I reached for a fresh tea towel to lay over the wound; my compromise. But Mirela had yanked a frying pan from its hook, a big wok-like metal thing. The two of us looked ready to cook and wipe up. She glanced at me, scorn in her eyes. She said two words. “For Kizzy.”

Stan hollered with fright and pain as she lifted the wok and brought it down on his face. He thrashed once, then lay still.

Mirela glimmered a smile. She had woken quite a bit since I last saw her. “Where is other? Put he out too.”

I trod warily to the space where Dr. Grace had writhed and fallen. There was no one there. We both stared at the empty space for long seconds. It was easy to imagine, after meeting Anaconda, that he’d dissolved into nothingness and left this Earth for good.

A powered roar came from outside. The throttle of a big bike. We ran, swerving and going off our feet. Through the kitchen and the lobby. We burst into the yard, but the Yamaha had gone.

Grace had come round with the fight gone out of him, thanks to Anaconda. Or perhaps he realized his two presumed victims had progressed to warrior status, complete with surgical and culinary weapons. A coward to the last, he’d sneaked out into the yard and taken off on his fat and shiny bike.

We stood for a while, catching our breath.

It was time to phone for the cops.

thirty-four
christmas eve

“T
hey’ll be opening the
doors soon,” Andy whispered.

“
Unlocking
the doors, you mean.” I was whispering too. Charter Hall. CORE. Not the place of no escape, although there seemed to be a great many in this town.

Friday night, less than sixty hours since I lay under Dr. Grace’s scalpel, and I was back on my feet. On my gumshoes, as Rey might have said, had he been here. It was Christmas Eve and mid
winter stood motionless at its deepest moment—
zero degrees outside and Andy’s Punto was in darkness, although the engine was running because Andy insisted we kept the heating on.

I had felt permanently chilled since I’d narrowly avoided being cut to pieces. Right now I was wearing a long-sleeved top over a vest top with a baggy jumper and a man’s padded gillet over that, all tucked under my loosest warm coat. I had long woolly socks on under my jeans and boots pulled over them. And, despite the efficient heating in the car, I was still cold.

The sensation returned all the time, like a bad acid flash. Me. Naked. On cold steel. And the swab, icy with antiseptic, stroking my skin.

_____

Mirela and I had been shipped to Bridgwater Hospital and made to stay there from Tuesday night to Thursday afternoon. They analyzed our blood and ran saline through our veins.

Marianne had stayed beside us all that time, flitting from my bed to Mirela’s. Heaven knows how she had convinced the staff she should be allowed to stay, but convincing is what she did for a living. She had helped us get discharged and bundled us both back to Harold Street. Mirela would sleep in my spare bedroom until arrangements could be made for her to go home. In fact, she slept most of the time, only waking when I encouraged her to eat. She told me in fits and starts how Stan had raped her up in the office while Dr. Grace prepped me in the kitchen. An attack with a wok was, in Romani eyes, only the start of retribution for taking Mirela’s purity. But Stan’s cruelty had served us well twice over; Mirela had been shaken out of her sedation by the act committed upon her, and it had given Anaconda precious moments to return to Dr. Grace’s tattoo.

She also told me about the day she’d disappeared. Stan had asked her if she’d heard from Kizzy. She’d been happy to tell him about the letter, but she thought he’d seemed surprised at its contents. That suggested Kizzy had not written exactly what Grace had expected her to write.

“Him tell me he had letter too, saying where Kizzy lived now.”

Stan had concocted a story about better accommodations and better working conditions in the Finchbury Branch. He’d let her go home early, saying he’d help her transport her luggage. He’d sworn her to secrecy, of course.

“Stan say everyone want this good jobs like for Kizzy and me,” Mirela had said. He’d picked her up in the Land Cruiser outside the house on the day her sister’s body had been discovered on the cooling towers. “Him all smiles, driving big car. He take me to house in country.”

“Pink,” I had added.

“Yes. They put me in room. They lock door. They make sleep with drink.” She had smiled. “When I dream, I am with Kizzy, so … not mind, much.” Mirela had become wretched, waiting for Kizzy to come back. I imagined her thinking
better dead and with Kizzy than endlessly searching for her.

She was an easy victim.

But they had forgotten about me.

_____

Thursday evening, Rey had called on me. He’d brought flowers, yellow roses. He could not have known I was off yellow at the moment. Like Juke’s lilies, which were still going strong (probably thanks to genetic modification), they were gentled into a jug and a place on the breakfast bar, where they looked quite handsome.

Rey had taken me gingerly into his arms and kissed me. Perhaps he was getting confused and thought I really had an incision around my ribs. We sat on the sofa, wrapped in each other while he brought me up-to-date.

“We’ve arrested the elder Mr. Papazov,” Rey had said. “But we’ll need to release him soon.”

“What?”

“On bail. He’s not off the hook. But naturally, he’s saying he knew nothing about any of this. And Stanislaus is backing him up.”

The way Stan always looked nervous when his father was around suggested Papazov was telling the truth. Maybe this was Stan’s solo venture, planning to get a financial head start on his father.

“Has Stan confessed?”

“That wasn’t an issue. He knew you’d testify.”

“Too bloody right.”

“He’s given us the name of the first dead girl,” Rey had continued. “They’d brought her over last spring, but she never went missing, officially.” He smiled. “They reused the same few passports, time and again. Young Romani are apparently interchangeable, even for the immigration authorities.”

“Stan told you all that?”

“Yep, he’s singing like Maria Callas.”

“Has he given you other names in the chain?”

“We’re getting there. Improbably, Stan is claiming he and Grace managed the work between them. According to Stan, they never used anaesthetic equipment. Mostly, I think, to keep the number of people involved down to a minimum. They used heavy injections of curare and hypnotics, and that can be dangerous; it’s possibly why the young girl died last summer. Most of the victims did get paid, like Kate, for their one kidney, but with that first death, they hit on the idea of doing clean sweeps.”

I had grimaced at that thought. “Any sightings of Grace?”

“Not yet, but info is dripping from our diva Stan, so it won’t be long. Turns out Grace had been a plastic surgeon by trade, with practices in several European countries. He became involved with the
Mutri
when he was offered a lot of money to change some faces.”

“So how did he end up doing what he did?”

“Something went wrong. Maybe a death; maybe a man was scarred. Whatever happened, he’d become friends with Stanislaus Papazov and found sanctuary back here in a tidy little business. He used his own equipment to set up at Papa Bulgaria.”

“No wonder they kept everything so clean.”

“They probably made more between midnight and four in the morning than all day delivering takeaway.”

“Who would have believed it?”

“Looks like you did, Sabbie. If Mirela hadn’t come to see you after Kizzy disappeared, we might still be searching for an answer.”

Rey had to struggle hard to admit this. I had already caused Bridgwater CID massive embarrassment. The papers had not yet got the entire story … they were never going to get it from me … but headlines screamed the bits they’d gleaned. The broadsheets went for alliteration (as Lettice might have it):
Shaman Solves Surgical Sadism
. The tabloids had fun with puns. My favourite so far was
Psych-Dick! Local Fortuneteller Nabs Organ Snatcher!

“We’d have got there eventually. We just didn’t get there quickly enough.” Rey had stopped to check the chunk of watch clipped to his wrist. “Gary Abbott could blend into the seediest environment, but he was terrible at telling us things. Actually, he’d told us nothing, and now we’ll never know just how close he’d got. We were focused on surgeons and hospitals. Papa Bulgaria was part of an entirely different equation.”

“Until you arrested their chef.”

“Yeah. See, we knew Jimmy was lying to us. But we couldn’t work out in what way.”

“He wasn’t lying, Rey. He was confused. How is he now, by the way?”

“I don’t know. Why should I know that?”

“Haven’t you even made a courtesy call? To apologize?”

Rey had looked at me as if I’d asked him to babysit a kitten. He couldn’t even apologize to me. His treatment of Jimmy Browne was seen to be procedural necessity.

“I’ll do it,” I’d told Rey. “I’ll go and see him.” My heart feared for Jimmy. It would be hard for him to get another job. Bridgwater had a long memory.

Something pulled at the skin on Rey’s face. It was grinding him down that he had not protected me, but I’d never wanted that sort of relationship with the man I loved. I had taken the job at Papa Bulgaria with my eyes wide open. I had known from the get-go that they were bad people.

I’d walked with Rey to my door.

“What will happen to the scooter?”

When I’d returned home from the hospital, the scooter was parked outside my house, and my coat, keys, shoes, and both mobiles were placed tidily in my porch. It struck me that this approach to planning murder was at the same level as using Blu-Tack to hide iPhones. Everything had been bundled away by the Bridgwater police.

Rey frowned. “I have no idea. I’ll have to look into it.”

“No hurry. I never want to straddle that bike again.”

“Ah! That reminds me. In an outhouse we searched behind the restaurant we found a yellow bicycle. I thought I’d seen you riding around on something similar.”

This had felt like the last straw. I was never going to be paid by Papa, and it looked like I would soon be back on Hermes’s saddle. I’d let out a long groan of despair.

“You did do so well,” Rey had said, his hands smoothing the outsides of my arms. “Went through so much. I was hoping I could take you out. Friday, perhaps? A meal?”

“Really? Because I have the perfect idea in mind. A night of sleuthing, Rey, in memory of fellow maverick Gary Abbott.”

That had caught him off-guard. His eyes had fired up. But he’d had to pretend, at least, that he disapproved. “What it is with you? Can’t you learn to crochet or something?”

_____

A telly-sofa-and-duvet day had made me feel a lot better, if no warmer. Christmas Eve morning I rose at seven, fed the hens, made porridge for Mirela, and gave a new client the first of their “two-for-one” aromatherapy sessions. I braved the shops in town and finally got round to my Christmas shopping.

After that, I’d taken a rest, to make sure I would be ready for that night.

I’d seen the poster outside the hall. Friday the 24th of December, CORE was holding a “Jesus is Born” special at Charter Hall. Mince pies and mulled fruit juice. Andy had sworn to face Eric and persuade Drea to come home. I really wanted to be part of it; I felt responsible for what had happened to Andy and Drea, and I cared about what would happen if Andy was allowed to confront Eric on his own. And now we had the force of the law on our side. Or at least, I was hoping we did.

The clock on the dashboard in Andy’s Punto ticked on. No one—not even an out-of-hours traffic warden—asked us to move. The street was busy with Christmas party-goers, but there was no sign of a police car, marked or unmarked. There was no sign of Avon and Somerset’s constabulary at all.

“I thought they’d roar up and go for it,” said Andy.

“No. Rey was adamant about that. They won’t storm in and terrorize a hall full of innocent people. They’ll come softy, softly.”

“They might not come at all.”

“I think they’ll come.”

Andy leaned his head against the car window and all I could imagine was how the chill would seep into his brain. “I rang Drea’s parents last night. To let them know.”

“I don’t suppose she’s allowed to contact them.”

“They’re taking it badly. When she disappeared the first time, they fought to get her away from CORE. So this time
…
it took me a while to tell them the news. I knew it was going to devastate them.”

I squeezed Andy’s hand, where it covered the gearstick even though the handbrake was on. He flashed me a smile.

“You never let the feeling go,” I agreed. “The lingering fear that the worse thing could happen again. Lightning could strike twice.”

I knew that “lingering fear” was one of the reasons I had never traced my roots. I’d lost my mother—she’d faded away before my eyes, dying in a sordid bed, alone except for a six-year-old girl who couldn’t help but keep a vigil for her because she had nowhere to go, no one to call upon.

In my logical mind, I knew that you can only lose your mother once, but my heart constantly reminded me that you can lose others—the replacements, the alternatives. It was bad enough knowing that Gloria and Philip were getting older, but at least they were solid parts of my world; they weren’t going to disappear. It was the natural relatives that worried me. They’re a bad risk. Best to never contact them, never link up.
They don’t know you
, I told myself,
and they won’t want to. Especially if you start off being the coloured girl who delivers their takeaway.

I hadn’t heard again from Lettice Mitchell. I felt bad for rejecting her, but I was sure she was fine, enjoying Christmas Eve canapés with Grandma Dare, no doubt. She would forget me as time went on. She would forget she ever had a cousin.

So it was ironic that I would never forget her.

Andy checked his watch against the dashboard clock. “Eric should be out any minute now.” He was staring down the street, mute and alert as a stag on a hill.

I was terrified that Andy was going to challenge them. Not like before, when he’d only called Drea’s name. This would be a confrontation between him and Eric; he was longing to lock antlers. I wondered who would come off best in a fight. Andy was young and in love, but Eric Atkinson had powerful shoulders and the belief that he was right about everything.

“Please don’t try anything. Leave it to the police.”

“What police?” muttered Andy.

Even I was getting jittery. Where was Rey and the backup he’d promised me?

He’d asked me out. In my hallway, hopping from foot to foot like a teenager. A proper date. That brought a candle-glow of warmth to my heart. He wanted to woo me. It was the missing brick from our courtship—in fact our courtship didn’t have a single brick, as it had never taken place. Rey wanted to change that, start again. That added a candle-glow of light to my head. Heck, I was glowing with candles.

Except I’d been stupid enough to get him off the hook. Instead of simpering, and saying,
Oh, Rey, dinner would be lovely
, I’d told him about tonight. Me and Andy. I thought I’d seen his eyes fire up, but in the end, he wasn’t here. It didn’t look as if I’d ever get my proper date now.