Hells gate, p.10
Hell's Gate, page 10
“Thanks.”
“Anything else we need to discuss?” he asked.
She turned her face away and stood up. “No, I don’t think so.”
“All right then.”
The rest of the evening involved a lot of waiting. A camera was found at the location where the first victim had been left by Sven, as well as one where she was abducted. The good news was that a camera had also been found at location four, confirming Zoë’s theory that Sven was or had been planning something there. The forensics team, however, had found nothing else.
Around 10 p.m., the team decided to call it a day and continue their work tomorrow. The locations would all be heavily guarded ovenight. Seamus drove Leo, Linda, and Zoë back to the hotel, where Naveed was faithfully waiting.
Leo put his hand on Zoë’s shoulder. “Whiskey?”
They sat down at the bar and ordered a glass each.
“He’s seen our crossword,” Leo said.
“If he’s even had time for that.”
“Because . . .?”
“I just don’t get it.” Zoë hung her head. “Location four has to be the location Sven means. He saw me on camera when we picked up the box, and at the others he didn’t. It has to be there.”
“So you think location four is actually location two, as indicated by the pattern of the knife marks?”
That was exactly what Zoë was thinking.
Leo batted the idea away with his hand. “We’ll continue with all that tomorrow. Tonight, he can’t do anything.”
“But what if she’s already dead?”
“I don’t think so. He wrote ‘when you could use a win,’ right? He’s giving you a chance, Zoë.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“Today just hasn’t been your day.”
Leo was of course referring to her breakup with Kenneth. Zoë had largely forgotten about it, but his words caused her sadness to come flooding back. She took a big sip of whiskey.
“I got a call from a local band who’ve asked me to drop by a big festival up in the Midlands on Wednesday night because their bass player is ill,” Leo said. He told her about his dilemma: the band was very popular, and it was an honor for them to call him, but at the same time, now wasn’t the best time to abandon the investigation team. Zoë thought he should do the gig as he’d only be gone for half a day. They carried on talking and didn’t notice Liam come in, so when he came up to her and put his hand on her shoulder, she wasn’t so much startled by his hand, but the fact it was him.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Of course not,” Leo responded.
“Sorry,” Zoë said apologetically, “but I just want to go to bed.”
She gave Leo a hug and said good night to Liam, knowing full well the interaction between her and Liam looked awkward and Leo was definitely going to ask questions about it the next day. She and Naveed walked up to her room, and within fifteen minutes she was in bed.
TUESDAY
* * *
Zoë awoke in the middle of the night. Something was eating away at her. Somewhere in her brain, an idea wanted to break out, but it seemed as if the hatch wouldn’t open. She gently slapped her cheek. Sven had something planned for location four, but it was too dangerous for him to go there, plus forensics had removed the camera from there the previous evening. He’d also seen they’d been there three times yesterday. He’d been playing it safe up to this point. What was he going to do if he couldn’t get to the location?
Suddenly, the hatch opened. She knew it! All of a sudden, she’d clicked. “250 meters to the south.” That was what he’d told her of the first victim at the original location. That area was too heavily monitored, which was why Sven had placed his first victim 250 meters to the south of it.
She got dressed and walked into the living room. “I’ve got to go. I’m heading out with some colleagues, so you can wait here,” she told Naveed.
He looked at her in astonishment. “I’ll walk with you.”
Zoë put on her coat and started off down the hallway. Who would she ask to come with her? Linda, of course, and Leo. But someone had to drive, and for some reason they hadn’t been given a car to use.
She knocked on Linda’s door, but when she got no answer, doubt began to creep in. Couldn’t this wait until the next morning? She wasn’t sure, but it felt as if she were running out of time. She knocked again in vain and then walked to the floor where Liam was staying to knock on his door. Thankfully, it opened within a few minutes.
“Zoë?”
“Sorry to bother you, but I think I’ve got something.”
“And it can’t wait?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on in.”
She gestured for Naveed to wait in the hallway before stepping inside.
Liam’s room was similar to hers, but a little tidier. She took a seat on the sofa while he sat on a chair directly opposite. He was barefoot and wearing a shirt and sweatpants. Zoë was intrigued to know what color socks he normally wore.
In a couple of sentences, she explained what she’d come up with.
“It’s a possibility,” he muttered. “Give me a minute—I just need to get dressed.”
He left her in the living room, where Zoë began to pace back and forth. On the desk were two photos: one of Liam and his wife, and the other of their entire family. Zoë saw they had three older children.
“Sean, Fenna, and Lisa,” she heard him say as he emerged from the bathroom.
“You have beautiful children, and a beautiful wife too.”
“Thank you. Shall we head off?”
“Shall we wake the others? I tried Linda, but no answer.”
Liam sighed. “You’re in a rush, aren’t you?”
Zoë told Naveed she was leaving and asked him to wait for her at the hotel. Together, she and Liam headed downstairs while she looked up the exact location on her phone. An hour and a half in the car with Liam . . . She didn’t quite know what to make of the prospect.
For the first part of the journey, they said nothing. Then, of his own accord, Liam began to talk about his family.
“I haven’t been completely honest with you about my wife,” he told her.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“I want you to know. My wife has been seeing someone else—for years, it turns out. We’ve been living apart temporarily because she wants to find out if she wants to be with him.”
“What about you?” Zoë asked. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been married for twenty-two years, and I love her. I just never thought about the idea of us breaking up. We haven’t had the best relationship, but it was good enough, I thought.”
“And now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Now you know she’s been cheating on you for years. Aren’t you angry?”
“No. You’d think I would be, but I’m not. I haven’t been a good husband, Zoë. Working day and night, that always came first. I wasn’t there enough for her or the children, so I understand why she looked elsewhere.”
“Unbelievable,” Zoë mumbled.
“Something like that would never happen to you, surely.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I’d react so calmly if it did.”
“I don’t always succeed in doing that, but I’ve known about it for a while, so the anger has worn off. If I’m angry at all, I’m angry with myself.”
She looked at him side-on. His eyes were bloodshot.
“What about you?” he asked.
“No, boss, that’s not how it works. You change the subject far too quickly. This isn’t about me right now.”
A smile appeared on his face. “This whole week’s mainly been about you, if you hadn’t noticed already.”
She shook her head. “But not right now.”
“Yes, even now. You’ve wandered into my life and turned everything on its head.”
“That’s not such a bad thing.”
“But it is, Zoë. Or it is for me at least. For the first time in my life, I’m completely clueless. I don’t know where to look when you’re around, and I say and do the stupidest things.”
“So you’re not normally such a bully?”
“No, I’m actually quite a nice guy.”
She smiled at him and felt herself drowning again. It was awkward. “Liam, my relationship just ended—or has all but ended—and we’re in the middle of a murder investigation. We can’t possibly be having this conversation right now.”
“That sounds extremely sensible, Ms. Janssen. So there’s nothing between us?”
He knew full well this wasn’t true. This man had touched her in a huge way. A tear escaped from the corner of Zoë’s eye and slid down her cheek. Liam held out his hand to wipe it away with his thumb.
“Nothing at all, boss,” she replied with difficulty. “You see that over there, right?”
They drove on in the dark in silence until they reached the brightly lit spot where they needed to be. A uniformed officer was standing half-asleep up against a tree, and the sight of their car pulling in startled him. They showed their IDs and explained what they’d come to do.
Zoë plotted a route 250 meters south using the compass on her phone, and they set off. The closer they got to the point, the faster they started to walk, until eventually they ended up in a clearing. The signs the soil had recently been turned over were encouraging.
“It’s here. He’s been here. I knew it!”
The two detectives dropped to their knees and started to dig like mad with their bare hands. It wasn’t long before the lid of a wooden coffin came into view. They quickly cleared the soil off it.
“There’s a padlock on it,” Liam said.
Zoë noticed it was a three-digit combination lock. “Try three threes, or three sixes, or three nines.”
No luck.
“Now one, two, three, or three, six, nine.”
Still nothing.
Liam tried all the numbers the other way around, and Zoë tried countless other possibilities with threes or multiples of three, but to no avail. The officer who’d been on patrol came running over, and Liam ordered him to go get a pair of bolt cutters. Zoë guessed it would take a while to find some. She sighed.
“Think, Zoë,” Liam said to her, grabbing her hands.
Zoë, she thought. Maybe that was it. Her name! She translated the letters into their positions in the alphabet. “Z” was the twenty-sixth letter, “O” the fifteenth, and “E” the fifth. If she then converted them to numbers below ten, the “Z” became an eight, the “O” a six, and the “E” remained a five.
“Eight-six-five!” she exclaimed.
Liam turned the lock, and to their surprise, it popped open.
With all their might, they pulled back the heavy lid together. What greeted them inside the coffin was a bizarre sight indeed. Lying there was a girl dressed in a long blue dress, her arms tied together on her stomach. Bizarrely, she was wearing an oxygen mask attached to an oxygen canister.
“I can’t breathe . . .”
The line from “Breathing” shot through Zoë’s head. Sven had used the song to tell them how he’d kill the victim. Thank God they’d arrived in time.
The girl looked up at them with wide eyes and started to scream, the oxygen mask dampening the sound. Zoë pulled the mask off her face, and Liam helped the girl to her feet. She broke down in tears as Liam held her, and Zoë stroked her back while she freed the girl’s hands.
“It’s over. You’re safe now.”
Liam got up to make a call. Zoë continued to hold the girl in her arms.
“Your name’s Charlotte, isn’t it?”
The girl nodded. She seemed to be calming down slightly. In between bouts of sobbing, she mentioned the name “Michael” several times.
“Is that your fiancé? Do you want us to call him?”
Charlotte tried to say something, but she couldn’t speak well. God only knows how long she’s been in there . . .
“Here you are.” Zoë gave Charlotte her phone, and the girl started to type in a number.
Michael answered so quickly his phone must have been next to him in bed. Still sobbing, Charlotte said it was her and that she’d been rescued. Liam meanwhile put his coat over her shoulders and helped her further out of the coffin. Charlotte spoke to her boyfriend half-crying, half-laughing, and after a while she passed the phone back to Liam.
“Can you tell him where we are?”
Liam picked up the phone. Zoë and Charlotte stayed sitting on the ground together.
“Shall we try to get up and walk a little bit?” Zoë suggested.
Charlotte struggled to get up. Together, they walked up and the down the length of the clearing several times, with each step getting easier and easier. Zoë had a hundred questions for Charlotte, but she left them for the time being. The time for questions would come later.
Within ten minutes, the constable had arrived with the bolt cutters, followed by an ambulance, a few more officers, and the forensics team. Charlotte was checked over by the paramedics, given a cup of tea and a blanket, and ordered to stay put until her boyfriend arrived. The two of them fell into each other’s arms when he did, and all they could do was switch between crying and laughing.
Zoë looked on from afar. They’d made it on time and saved her. She looked at Liam, put her hand on her heart, and silently mouthed, “Thank you,” to him. She was grateful he’d taken her idea seriously.
Charlotte and her boyfriend were eventually carried away in the ambulance. Liam was busy talking, and Zoë didn’t know what to do. As she walked over to him, she heard a forensics officer explaining that there’d been enough oxygen in the canister for about six hours.
“You saved her,” Liam said.
“This time, yes.”
He grabbed her by her shoulders with two hands and looked directly at her. “You saved her, Zoë.”
She saw his look and knew he was trying to convince her to be proud of herself. But she was far from proud. If anything, this had made her more relieved.
“I know.”
Liam had to sort out a couple of things before they drove back together. Using a towel, Zoë tried to wipe most of the earth off her hands and arms. She went over to a group of officers, got Liam and herself a cup of tea, and then walked back to his car.
The tea was lukewarm by the time Liam had finished talking, and Zoë saw on her phone it was now the early hours of the morning. It wouldn’t be much longer before the sun came up. On the drive back, she enjoyed the monotonous sound of the engine, immediately waking up as soon as the car came to a stop.
Liam got out, and Zoë realized they weren’t back at the hotel yet; they were standing on the side of a narrow road overlooking a lake. Liam was leaning against the car looking out across the water. Zoë got out too.
“I almost fell asleep there.”
She stood next to him. “It would have been pretty reckless if we’d hit a tree last night and not survived.”
“Very reckless indeed.”
Side by side, they watched as the sun crept up and transformed the sky into a canvas of pinks and oranges. Zoë was shattered, but there was no other place she’d rather be. She put her head against Liam’s shoulder, and the two of them stood there for a while until the sun had fully risen. Then, without exchanging a word, they got back in the car.
For the final part of the ride, Zoë stayed awake, and the pair talked about the day ahead. John and Graham would get everything started so she and Liam could get a couple of hours’ sleep.
“Why don’t I treat you to lunch, and then we’ll join the others back at the station?” Liam suggested.
Zoë liked the sound of that.
When they arrived back at the hotel, she dragged herself upstairs with Liam walking closely behind her. At the door to her room, he looked at her.
“We saved her, boss,” she told him.
“We sure did. Sleep well, beautiful,” he said, giving her a wink.
Tamzin was sitting in the room waiting for her. As briefly as she could, Zoë summarized what had happened, and above all how exhausted she was. She took a short shower, put on some clean underwear and a T-shirt, and collapsed onto her bed.
After less than four hours of sleep, her alarm went off. She could feel the tiredness throughout her entire body and took a long shower to try to rid herself of the sensation. Her clothes had been washed, and she donned a pair of jeans with a blue silk blouse. In front of the mirror she carefully prepared herself, pretty satisfied with the results.
Liam meanwhile had texted to say he was downstairs waiting for her. Zoë texted, “And good morning to you too,” in reply with a smiley face. In a slight rush, she picked up her leather jacket and backpack and wished Tamzin a pleasant day.
The moment she walked into the lounge, Liam looked up from his newspaper. Her heart rate immediately kicked up. He hadn’t shaved and looked good in his turtleneck and jeans. Apparently, today he was allowed to dress casually for once.
The pair walked to his car and got in. Liam maneuvered smoothly through the heavy traffic and stopped at a coffee shop somewhere in the suburbs. “Best coffee in Brighton,” he announced.
Inside, they looked for a seat by the window. The café was busy and rather trendy, with a menu full of delicious sandwiches, salads, and seemingly countless varieties of coffee. They ordered coffee and a sandwich with a salad, and Zoë enjoyed the hubbub all around her. On the table next to them was a mother with a little boy. She was trying to read a newspaper while the boy demanded her constant attention. She’d brought him a coloring book and some felt-tip pens, but these were failing to keep him occupied. The mother’s tone got sterner and sterner the longer they sat there. When the boy looked Zoë’s way, she gave him a big smile and got an even bigger one in return.
“Did you sleep well?” Liam asked.
“Not for very long, but well enough. And you?”
