The Deceit

39

Karen’s eyes adjusted. The room was apparently empty. Eleanor was not here. The only obvious presence in the room was that dazzling white glare, emitted by a professional camera light on a tripod: and adjusted so that it shone directly at the door.

‘Ellie?’ Karen said. Then she shouted, loudly: ‘Eleanor?’

Nothing. There was no one in the room. There was maybe no one in the building. Karen worked the logic. Rothley was surely tricking her, if not taunting her: that was certain. But how was he doing it? There had to be a speaker, concealed in the room: that was the only answer. A speaker relaying Eleanor’s voice. So where was it?

Shielding her eyes from the intense glare, Karen walked to the camera light, and knocked it to the left. Urgently she scanned the walls, the grubby cornicing, the picture rail. Spiders shrank away in the corners. It was so dark and dirty, up there, she could hardly see anything. Maybe there wasn’t a speaker?

She tried just one more time. ‘Eleanor! Ellie! It’s Mummy!’

A spider fell to the floor, near her feet, and fled into the shadows under the window.

These windows, Karen noted, were barred with black and rusted iron. What was out there? Some kind of basement stairwell, perhaps, leading up to the drizzly, empty, lamplit street. Perhaps Eleanor had been here and Rothley had taken her out that way. But how could he have done it so quickly? It was all mad, and it was cleverly menacing.

Karen stepped to the old sash window and looked out: it was indeed a stone stairwell. A wet, bleached pink copy of the Financial Times wrapped itself around the iron railings. The window-bars were flaking paint. And the glass of the window seemed to smell. Of what? How could glass smell?

‘Eleanor …?’

Suddenly she saw it: just under the window, screwed to the wall, concealed by the sill, was a tiny metal box. Karen leaned down and examined the device. It was a relaying speaker, miniaturized and expensive, wired directly into the wall. A tiny red light showed that it was on.

So that was how Rothley had tricked her: by relaying the voice of her daughter, expertly tormenting her, seducing her with fear. But was it a recording? Or was it live? Was he here with her anyway? Was she somewhere else? Maybe even lost in this maze of dingy cellars?

Despair began to strangle Karen’s feeble hopes. She was never going to find her daughter, the whole thing was a game, his game: he was playing her for repulsive fun. Probably there was some tiny CCTV camera in here as well, disguised by the plaster cornicing, or hidden in the grime, through which he was watching and revelling in her despair.

Karen spun around, shouting at the ceiling, at the high and peeling walls. ‘Fuck you!’

She didn’t really care if there were cameras or not: she was beyond reason now. She just wanted to shout. So she did.

‘Where is my daughter? Give her back to me! I am here! Take what you want, but give my daughter back! Fuck you!’

A rat scuttled, somewhere — probably in a wall cavity — alarmed by her shouts; but the only other response was a shocked silence. As if this derelict and dying old building was affronted by her vulgar outburst.

Karen took deep breaths. ‘Come on, Karen. Think.’

She was a policewoman; she needed a reminder of that. She could work this out, sort it, unpuzzle it. What clues did she have? It was clear Rothley had been in here, to set up this noxious and ornate charade. He must have left clues.

Stepping into the centre of the room she looked around. In the corner, opposite the lamp, stood four foot-high stone jars, curvaceous and elegant, cream-coloured, neatly arranged. Only the carved stone lids differed: one was sculpted as a hawk’s head, one as a serpent’s head, one as a dog’s head, and the last a jackal’s. Karen had seen jars like this before … but where? She sieved her memories. Frantic and fast. Where?

At last it came to her. She’d seen jars exactly like this on her many visits to the British Museum with Eleanor. They went there often, because Eleanor loved the totem poles and Viking swords and big stone lions. And she really loved the mummies in the Egyptian rooms.

Karen did her best to ignore her intense, intense fear as she approached the jars. But the fear got her anyway. These, she now recalled, were alabaster Canopic jars. Special vessels used by ancient Egyptians for the preservation of human viscera, the internal organs of dead people. The lungs and lights were extracted from the body before mummification and kept in these ritual containers, to be left in the tomb alongside the disembowelled corpse.

Human remains?

Whose human remains were in these jars?

She knew. It would be Eleanor in here. She was going to open the jars and find Eleanor’s vital organs: her little liver, her tiny six-year-old heart …

Karen trembled with the terror, and struggled to hold back the tears. Then she seized her courage. ‘Fuck you, Rothley.’

She plucked off the top of one jar. It was empty. And the next? Karen slapped the lid away, with a clatter. This jar was empty too; so she flipped off the other two lids. And her heart paused. The final jar was not empty: it was full of some kind of viscous, amber-coloured oil. Black things floated in suspension.

Karen tilted the jar and poured some of the contents onto the floor. The black things were the severed heads and wings of beetles. Scarab beetles. The smell was sickly sweet.

She shuddered in horror, and relief. All this, she knew, was designed to unnerve her, to prolong and attenuate her terror; and it was working. Karen slapped the lid back on this last jar, sealing the dregs of liquor inside. Then she whirled around. What else was in the room?

Three white cats were lined up, stiff and dead, in the opposite corner. Karen crossed the room and knelt before them. Their fur was a pure, snowy white, unearthly in the dust. The only marks that blemished them were gory scarlet stains at the groin. Karen looked closely. No, they weren’t stains, they were wounds. The cats had been crudely castrated. They had been tom cats, and someone had scissored off their genitals.

She stifled her nausea. And tried to work out the puzzle. Because Rothley, in his passionate and elaborate cruelty, might just have made a mistake. And left a clue.

The lights. The jars. The cats. The cats were key …

A noise disturbed her. A kind of violent flapping. She turned, terrorized. Her mouth quite open and dry.

The window was now wholly and instantly obscured, because some huge thing was trying to get in, something like a bat, but a monstrous bat, two yards wide, engulfing the window, flapping and growing, angry and maddened, attempting to get through the glass.

The flapping intensified. Karen backed away, consumed with horror, yet transfixed.

What the fuck was this? The animal — but it wasn’t even an animal, it was a demon, a desperate horrible thing — this thing was scratching at the glass, with claws, or hands, and the flapping was so loud and so very intense, as if the thing was trapped outside, furiously trying to get in, to get at Karen …

And then it was gone. Disappeared.

Karen stood there in the room, panting with fear. What had she just seen? She could make no sense of it.

It was the last thing she wanted to do, but she had to do it. Gripping her emotions, Karen walked across the room to the barred window and stared out into the gloom, cupping a hand to the side of her face to shield the light.

A tarpaulin was flapping noisily over the window next door, snagged on the iron bars. It was vast and it was black, and it had obviously come loose in the wind and sleet, first catching on this window, then on the next. Maybe it had been used to protect a skip; perhaps it was something the builders had installed to shelter machinery, but it had come loose in the brutal cold wind and momentarily covered the window.

So in her heightened state of terror, amped to perfection by Rothley’s hideous theatrics, she had managed to turn a humble sheet of black tarpaulin into a demon.

For a moment Karen breathed more easily. She wasn’t going mad, she hadn’t been bewitched, Rothley wasn’t really a sorcerer or a magician: he was just a sadist and he could be found and she could save her daughter.

Then a tiny voice froze the thoughts in Karen’s mind. A little girl’s voice.

‘Mummy?’

Eleanor? It sounded like Eleanor, but very, very far away this time. Or very muffled.

‘Mummy …’

There it was again. It was real and it was agonized and it was coming from below.

Karen flung herself to the floor, pressed an ear to the cracks in the floorboards, and heard it again.

‘Mummy, please help me, please, please come and get me.’

The voice was so tiny and muffled, and yet very near.

‘Mummy Mummy Mummy.’

Karen shouted through the cracks, ‘Eleanor, where are you?’

‘M’under here, Mummy, I’m down here.’

Karen spun around, frantic. What was down there? Under the floorboards? The searching memory of the girl with the severed fingers pitched her into a deeper panic.

‘Where? Eleanor? How do I get there, darling? Tell me!’

‘Here … here … down here. Find me …’

The voice was fading, and dying, fading into the sound of tears, then nothing.

Karen searched the floor, looking for newer floorboards, nailed down, recently replaced, but there was nothing. Then she saw the trapdoor. In the far corner. By the threshold. She’d stepped right over it. Karen raced over to it; it had a finger hole in the centre and she forced two fingers in and lifted up. A black socket yawned. Like that old tin mine in Cornwall. Karen turned on her torch, and directed the light into the blackness. Wooden steps descended into the murk, tinged with faint orange, or yellow, like the shadow of firelight.

‘Mummy?’

Eleanor was here. There was no mistaking that. Eleanor was down in this cellar. Alive. This was no relaying speaker. She could save her.

Then she heard another voice. A man’s voice.

‘Atha atha atharim.’