Cages, p.27
Cages, page 27
Cox looks around him, basking in the absolute beauty of the objects before him.
There are nine of them. Seven girls. Two boys. Each were beautiful, in life. Exceptional, even. Pure, virginal, timeless, angelic … each had seemed like a gift from the gods. Each was perfect: exquisite blocks of marble which he could transform into something exquisite and eternal.
Cox first learned of corpse wax at the foot of his Magister. Iveson had discovered something long since dead in one of the chambers beneath the lake. Whatever it had been in life, in death it had been transformed into a wax effigy; a monster carved in soap and tallow. The process, the substance, is called Adipocere. A product of decomposition, it turns dead flesh into a soap-like substance. It develops in damp, alkaline-rich environments and occurs when body fat is exposed to anaerobic bacteria. In the right light, in the right environment, it can resemble the surface of the moon. Crumb like, strange, haunting, it feels like soap. It can be moulded. It can be carved. Were one given to such acts of Baroque metamorphosis, one could take a human body, strip it, bind it, and shape it to one’s will. One could expose it to the right bacteria. And over the course of many years, a human being could become a statue: a thing of beauty. Griffin Cox is such a man.
He lays on the cold stone, and stares. Truly, he has accomplished something of merit and significance. He does not mourn the deaths of those whose lives he has claimed – only wishes they were still alive to see the breath-taking results of their sacrifice. He sometimes wonders how it felt for each of them to wake here, in the cold and the dark, tied and nailed and twisted into a position that would eventually become their own spectacular tombstone. He imagines they felt fear, though he struggles to imagine such a sensation. Cox hasn’t been afraid in a long time. As soon as he started killing people and mounting their bodies in the dark place beneath the lake, all of his worldly worries went away.
Slowly, leisurely, Cox turns onto his side. There is moss and pondweed cushioning the rock beneath him. He’s cold but the chill serves to make his nerve-endings more sensitive so he makes no attempt to dress himself. He lies still as the creations that surround him: winged furies; laughing nymphs; a mighty warrior in breast-plate, clutching a spear.
‘Omnia bona capient finem,’ he mutters, and the sound echoes back so that it feels as though his head is reverberating with a hundred whispered voices, all telling him the same thing. All good things must come to an end.
The thought truly dismays him. If there were a way, he would have his sculptures sent ahead to the new home, but the risks are too great. He knows that when he climbs back up through the trapdoor and into the boat shed, he will have to turn the sluice gate and allow the water to flood the chamber. He will have to leave his creations to the rising sludge. He will weep, perhaps, as he drives away; head shaved, a neat goatee beard, little round glasses and a scar upon his cheek: all affectations carefully chosen to make him appear as far from Griffin Cox as can be achieved. He feels excited at the prospect. It has taken an irritating amount of time to make the journey down to Cambridgeshire: a tiresome relay in a series of bland vehicles – their keys left out for him on the rear tyre – and staying in pre-booked, nondescript hotels. His first sip of red wine since his incarceration was a true disappointment. He had let it dribble from his mouth and onto the bedlinen as if it were inferior blood. But soon he will be in a country where pleasure is performed correctly. His life will be beauty, and experience: truly – a paradise worthy of Caesar.
He stands. Dresses himself. Wrinkles his nose as the inferior material of the shirt, trousers and bland tie touch his skin. It will not be like this for long, he consoles himself. Soon it will be silks and ermine. It will be marble and soapstone. It will be flesh, and wax.
As he turns to look one final time upon the soap-rimed, greasy statues, he sees a flicker of movement – something, or somebody is with him, in the dark, beneath the lake.
‘Magister? Wilson, you shouldn’t be here, what if you were followed – imagine if somebody saw you enter …?’
The voice rushes towards him like a gathering storm.
‘Yes,’ says Annabeth, emerging from the stone plinth beneath the mutilated remains of Luke Ashley. ‘Just imagine.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Annabeth watches him, his face a smudge of dirt and slime but expressionless as a full moon.
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No, nobody followed me. I made sure.’
She smiles at him. There’s no humour in it. ‘And yet here I am.’
He stands up, slowly, unashamed by his nakedness. He’s a small man but there’s a strength to him: his limbs hard, roped with thick veins.
He glances at her right hand and Annabeth follows his eyes. Sees the long, lethal-looking boathook. She’d scooped it up from the boat shed as she made her way slowly and silently into the dark – fighting down her rising gorge as she saw what had been done to the young people who had suffered the misfortune of meeting a true personification of evil. Holds it like a lance, as she stares from Griffin Cox to the gallery of disintegrating flesh, and back again.
She has remained silent throughout his communion with the bodies of his dead. She has watched the rapture with which he has beheld the spectacle: the gallery of dripping tallow corpses mounted in a grotesque tableau in the long, gloomy passageway.
‘I don’t understand,’ says Cox, frowning. ‘You did as you were bid. You helped me. I wouldn’t break our pact, Miss Harris. Never. I don’t know how you’ve found yourself here, or why, but you have made a very poor judgement. This won’t end well.’
Annabeth smiles at him, something like pity in her gaze. ‘You really did convince yourself you were in charge,’ she says, quietly. ‘Mark Fellowes told you what I wanted you to be told.’
He shakes his head. ‘No. No, he hates you.’
‘Mark Fellowes, your cell-mate in Frankland – I visited him with the restorative justice charity I worked with. He recognized me at once. He’d gone back to the flat, you see – after Defreitas tried to kill me. I think there may be some goodness in him, somewhere. He told me to go. To get out of there. He cleaned up. Put the body where it wouldn’t be found until he was long gone. When he saw me, I thought it was over. All that I’d worked for, all the miles I’d put between myself and my past. But he recognized me as the girl who’d killed a bad man. I hadn’t changed so much that he didn’t know me. But the thing with Fellowes is, he owns what he’s done wrong. We talked. And he told me about his cell-mate – this true work of evil, this monster, who knows where the bodies of all those missing people are.’
‘No,’ says Cox, again, stepping forward into the muddy earth with a squelch. ‘No, he told me—’
‘I don’t know how quickly your mind is working here, Griffin, but in a moment you’re going to see it all very clearly. I’ve taken more lives than you have. Defreitas was the first, my baptism, if you like, and it was many years before there was another. I suppose it was frustration that pushed me into it – frustration at seeing good people in pain. Men like you, they’re all about power. About control. About causing maximum suffering and pain. And all those years I worked with the missing persons charity, I couldn’t get past the idea that those who know where a body is buried should be made to give up that knowledge. That somebody should do something.’
‘And that somebody is you?’ asks Cox, and there is scorn in his eyes. ‘You became a prison officer just to get close to people like me?’
‘No, you were just the most difficult to get to. By the time I realized that you were guilty of all the crimes you’re linked to, I’d already put plenty of recently released cons where they belonged. Opened their throats, usually.’
She stares at him, her voice amplified by the low brick ceiling of the chamber. Watches him form the pieces into a coherent shape.
‘You wanted me to come to Holderness? You wanted me there so you could help me escape.’
She nods: a teacher pleased with a student. ‘Go on.’
‘But you needed me to feel I was in control. I was the one manipulating you …’
‘The families deserve to know what happened to these children. I needed you to lead us to them.’
Cox chews his cheek. ‘And now?’
Annabeth shrugs. ‘You’re not going off to your new life, Griffin. We’re going to have to leave you here.’
The killer looks at her with something like admiration. ‘You keep saying “we”,’ mutters Cox. He looks around slowly. The water only reaches his ankles, but further down the chamber slopes and deepens and opens out into the body of the lake. But there is no way in from the water itself. The sluice gates are down and have been for decades. There is no way in save for the twisty passageway that winds down from the boathouse. The effort of bringing his prizes here has half killed him before now. The climb is exhausting, even without the encumbrance of a struggling adolescent across his shoulders. Annabeth must be tired. Afraid. But is she alone? If he were to rush her, there might be somebody more physically able standing at her side. He is so close to his goal. Has looked upon the fruition of his work and can almost taste the full-bodied Amarone that will be spilling down his chin within days. He can’t permit her to stop him. Can’t let it end here.
Annabeth watches as he weighs his options. In the silence, she hears a sudden vibration: the soft trill of a phone buzzing upon damp rock.
‘You should get it,’ she says, not unkindly. ‘He’ll want to know you’re OK. You can tell him the truth, or let him live in ignorance.’
Cox reaches out. Picks up the phone. Listens to the breathy voice of the man who tried to stop him becoming the thing that he is.
‘Magister …’
Annabeth listens. Lets him talk to the man who raised him: who saw the dark thing within him and tried to help him control it; the man who didn’t even turn on him when he found the bodies beneath the lake and decided to help conceal his crimes rather than ensure he face justice for them. He owed the boy’s mother that, didn’t he? What is love if not doing that which seems unpalatable for the good of somebody else?
He looks at Annabeth. Realizes he has never really seen her before. For an instant, there is a connection, as if staring into his own eyes in a mirror. And then he takes his chance. Lunges forward, stepping into the shallows, sprinting through the tangle of weeds and dark water, as Annabeth raises the boathook like a spear, and launches it straight at Cox’s heart.
THIRTY-NINE
The sudden tug; the sensation of being punched in the chest; the burning, searing pain, and he is falling backwards, turning, reaching out to grab for purchase and feeling his hand claw into the waxy, ruined flesh of the dancing nymph he created with the body of Bronwen Roberts.
He falls. Reaches out. Coughs blood, and slithers down into the water. He pulls himself up; the shaft of the boathook sticking from his gut; warm blood pumping onto his belly, and then he is looking at a new shape; a new apparition. He is looking at a teenage boy; fresh-faced, smooth-skinned – something very like madness in his eyes.
And then Ethan Harris is grabbing the shaft of the makeshift spear, and pushing it further into his guts.
Cox’s vision becomes a mosaic; a mandala of random pieces and parts. He sees the water. Black coffee and quicksilver. His head jerks back as he feels a sudden urgency. He lurches forward, and then he is slithering down and into the water. The cold is agony. He cannot tell whether his eyes are open or closed. He takes a desperate gulp and chokes as water floods inside him. It feels as though there are hands dragging at the tails of his coat, at his floundering feet, pulling him down. He kicks desperately, reaching out with his hands, feels the toes of his boots catch the river wall. He pushes against the slimy surface but cannot find the strength to propel himself upwards. He reaches out, frantic, clawing at the water as if it were a net he could climb. Inside his skull it is all static and echo. For a moment he fancies that the water has taken on a human shape; that it has transformed into a pale and phosphorescent assemblage of limbs …
And now he is reaching out, encircling his hands around the corpse that eddies with each movement of the water. The arms are taut and elongated, bound at the wrists with a wire that eats into the puffy white skin. He feels himself go under again, as if there are weights tied about his ankles: hands clawing at his clothes. He kicks out, hearing himself gasp and spit, water in his nose, his mouth, his ears. He tips his head back. Tries to shout. Gulps down another foul-tasting mouthful of brown slime. Turns himself over and feels the body bounce against his torso. Instinctively he lashes out. Pushes the corpse away with hands that do not feel like his own.
Spears of torchlight cast distorted polka dots onto the surging surface of the water. He tries to focus on the light, his teeth chattering, fingers numb. He is shivering, fading, unable to tell his body what to do, and then it feels as if somebody is dragging at his coat, pulling him away from his anchorage at the wall, and he is thrashing wildly, certain that the corpse is reaching out for him like a siren. He feels the meaty impact of his fist hitting bone. His gorge rises as his fingertips rake through the rotten meat of the dead girl’s flesh, as if pulling a rake through soft mud. He gasps, raising his hand high; an eager pupil, desperate to be picked: skin sliding free of muscle, tendon, bone … He tries to find something to hold. Clutches frantically at the dead girl’s skin.
He can see his breath rising, drifting upwards through the dark, and as his hands fasten around some solid part of the corpse’s remaining tissue, he feels a tug, as of a fishing wire snapping beneath the strain. The body rises up; seal-like, ascending in a spume of white-flecked spray. Cox looks into the empty eye sockets of the faceless corpse. Glimpses metal.
Cox feels a great sadness bloom inside him. Shivers, and blood runs into his mouth. Blood and dirty water, upon his lips, his tongue, his throat. He smells it. Rust and old machinery, raw liver and Irish stout. Smells iron. Smells blood.
He awaits the tunnel of the light: the triumphant song that will accompany his ascent into Elysium.
The silence is absolute.
He takes a great shuddering breath, eyes bright as alabaster.
And then the darkness closes over him like the mouth of a shark.
‘Like ink.’
Ethan reaches down and picks up the phone. Hears the sounds of violence. The ragged breathing of a dying man. Speaks before he can help himself; before his mother can leap forward and knock the phone from his hands.
‘Rufus?’
Then there is just the silence, and the bodies, and the familiar sound of Annabeth Harris sobbing to herself, quiet and contained, as she asks herself, again, how many bodies it will take to fill the void within her – how many she will have to kill before she regains that which was taken by a man who thought he could do what he wanted to her and who died without facing the consequences.
How many abusers will have to die?
She asks it of herself, as she has so many times. How many, before she stops being afraid.
The answer comes in a voice that is not her own: a white-hot sensation right inside her head.
All of them.
Every last one.
EPILOGUE
Detective Constables Ben Neilsen and Andy Daniells are standing in the courtyard garden at the rear of the big old hall where Griffin Cox grew up. His body was recovered last night from a hidden network of rooms concealed beneath the surface of the algae-covered lake.
Also discovered in the secret grotto were a grotesque collection of waxy body parts and defleshed bones. How he had come to meet his end remains the subject of speculation. Wilson Iveson is dead, and unable to offer any light in the darkness. Neilsen has hopes that Rufus Orton, should he ever wake, will be able to provide answers. He also hopes that he keeps his mouth shut about who it was who told him how to find his way to Iveson’s residence, and who wound him up like a clockwork toy and let him skitter away down a dangerous path.
It was Neilsen who broke the news to Bob Roberts. Told him that they were all but certain they had found Bronwen. Bob hadn’t spoken for what seemed like forever. Then he wanted to know if she had suffered. Neilsen hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth. He’d promised it was quick, and painless.
‘He’s a fighter, I tell you that,’ says Daniells, looking up at a mossed-over statue of a naked god of war. ‘Your writer mate.’
Neilsen nods. ‘His heart’s beating. I don’t know if that’s the same as “alive”.’
‘He’ll have a story to tell if he gets better.’
‘Sounds like a good enough reason to come back, I suppose.’
They stand in silence, looking up at the grand frontage of the old house, both lost in thought. Daniells feels as though he has been involved in something significant, but the pictures keep distorting and reforming: clouds glimpsed through smoke. He knows that in Griffin Cox he has glimpsed evil, but he fancies that he has inhaled the faintest trace of something else: something older. He feels as though he has been dumb witness to an act of primal vengeance: or restorative justice. He cannot define whether he believes Cox’s killer to be on the side of the angels or the demons. In the elegant Renaissance courtyard, surrounded by Classical statues and figures from antiquity, within sight of the place where a killer was created and taken apart, he wonders, briefly, upon notions of heaven, and the certainty of hell. Decides, on balance, it’s all still to play for.
