Strange colours swarm up the wall. I think I’m going to pass out, until I realize I’m seeing the reflections of flashing emergency lights converging on my home. That convoy wasn’t at Rufus Hall long. Perhaps Meunier directed it here.
If the police find me, there’s no way I’ll be able to explain; and there’s no way they’ll listen. Already, a police Land Rover is bouncing across the back garden. It looks so out of place I almost laugh. Abandoning my room, I stagger down the stairs.
I can’t go out the back, and now there are flashing lights out the front. Stepping around the axe, I re-enter the living room.
Kyle is standing there. His eyes are gone, his face a beetle-picked horror show. ‘You’re fucked,’ he hisses.
When I scream Kyle dissolves into ashes, revealing the side table. On it lies the rainbow disc printed with Gretel’s name. I know it’s a DVD. Why do I pretend otherwise? I might be a twelve-year-old boy who’s grown up in isolation from modern ways, but sometimes I know more than I think.
If the police find this disc – if they find my fingerprints on it – they’ll jump to conclusions that will damn me.
Through the window, I see movement. Police officers, coming up the path. My heart climbs into my throat.
Opening the case, I rip out the DVD. Then, falling to my knees, I post it through a gap in the floorboards. I toss the empty case across the room.
There’s hammering, now, and not just from rain. Stumbling to the hall, I notice the axe, still buried in the floor. It’s a moment’s work to tear it loose. Behind me, the kitchen door bursts open. Opposite, the front door swings wide.
A woman stands on the step, hair plastered to her scalp. I see no hint of compassion in her expression, no empathy for my plight. My fingers tighten around the axe shaft and I ask myself: Why should I see empathy? I know what I’ve done. And she knows it too.
‘Put it down,’ she barks, lips pulled back from her teeth. Uniformed officers surround her, grim-faced men who want to do me harm. She’s police, just like them, even though she doesn’t wear the uniform. Apart from the protective vest beneath her waterproof jacket, she’s dressed like an office worker: black trousers; cashmere jumper; smart shoes.
Play clothes, I think, and smile.
The woman repeats her instruction. In her eyes I see reflected movement. I turn to find a bearded policeman in the kitchen doorway.
He raises his hands. ‘Easy,’ he says. ‘Easy now.’
The words send a shudder through me.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I say, turning back to the female officer. In a sea of hostile faces, hers is the one I fear least. ‘I didn’t do any of it.’
It’s clear from her stare that she doesn’t believe me.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
I wheel around, checking the bearded policeman hasn’t crept closer. Then I turn back to the woman. My throat feels like someone’s squeezing it. For a moment I wonder if I’m choking. I begin to say my name, but this fantasy – this God-awful charade, into which I’ve retreated far too long – is over. Dead and buried.
‘Kyle,’ I say, laying the axe at my feet. ‘I’m Kyle North.’
‘Where is she, Kyle?’
‘She’s gone.’
The detective studies me. Some of the light drains from her eyes. ‘Kyle North, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the abduction and murder of Elissa Mirzoyan.’ Still talking, she steps into the hall. Her words wash over me like a wave. I glance behind me to see the policeman edging closer.
I don’t want to get hurt so I hold out my hands, palms up.
They wouldn’t cuff a twelve-year-old boy.
But they have no qualms about cuffing me.
Part II
* * *
Mairéad
I
To put out the blaze in the woods, Shropshire Fire and Rescue use all their available resources, sending appliances from Church Stretton and Craven Arms, as well as back-up units from the larger Shrewsbury station, including a command unit, an FIU and operational support. The crews pump water from a nearby freshwater lake to quell the flames, running their lines through the trees to reach the inferno. The rain helps. Without it, the entire wood might have burned.
When the storm moves south, some time after midday, Mairéad finds herself wishing for its return. Now, instead of thunder, the sky clatters with rotor blades. One of the helicopters is from NPAS in Birmingham, routed here to provide air support, but two others are news media, broadcasting live footage. Outside Meunierfields’ gates, the public road looks like a crash site, mobile-broadcast trucks and journalists’ cars parked nose to tail.
All week, Mairéad has used the press to keep Elissa Mirzoyan’s face on TV screens, newspapers and social media. Search parties, comprising hundreds of police and civilian volunteers, have combed acres of countryside, both in Dorset, where the girl was snatched, and Wiltshire, her home county.
Thousands of hours of CCTV footage and ANPR data have been reviewed and cross-referenced. Hundreds of Bedford vans have been tracked and checked. Now, six days after the abduction, Mairéad stands in this rain-soaked wood and stares down into an abyss.
Of the building at the heart of the blaze, only the outer walls remain. Everything else – the roof and both floors – collapsed into the cellar, where, the ACFO informed her, it burned so fiercely that almost nothing remains.
Black water fills the cellar to a depth of two feet. A couple of enterprising Scenes of Crime Officers are moving about in the filth, rubberized waders pulled over their white suits. Earlier, one of them stubbed his toe on what he thinks is a metal hoop sunk into a bed of concrete. There’s no way of confirming that until the water level recedes, but Mairéad suspects it’s true.
There was this time, last summer. Mum promised to take me to London. I’d always wanted to ride on the Underground, take a Tube to all the famous stops – check out Madame Tussauds, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, 221B Baker Street.
Elissa had been smart enough to code a message into the YouTube broadcast, had even managed to embed information into the letter sent to Lasse Haagensen. She hadn’t deserved this.
All around the site, blackened tree trunks rise like grave markers from the sodden earth. A female SOCO trudges over, boots squelching in sludge. ‘Nothing,’ she says, raising her mask and casting around in disgust. ‘Fire burned most of it, then the fire brigade flooded what was left.’
‘Can’t blame them.’
‘I don’t,’ the SOCO replies. ‘I blame the animal that snatched her.’
Nodding, Mairéad turns away. The crime scene in the woods might be a lost cause, but at least the cottage where they arrested their suspect remains intact. Upstairs, they found a video camera, a lighting rig and a portable power pack. Scattered across the floor was a magpie’s nest of plunder, among which they identified a pair of glasses belonging to Bryony Taylor and a rosewood chess piece. In a cupboard downstairs they discovered a laptop and a stack of homemade DVDs. Some of the discs bore the names of missing children long presumed dead.
The twin cottages, one burnt-out and one intact, aren’t the only crime scenes on the estate. Inside Rufus Hall, officers found Leon Meunier hanging from a beam. His death can’t be a coincidence, but so far they haven’t established a connection.