Chapter 24
SCARLETT
My eyes struggle to focus. The first thing that hits me is the smell. Damp. Decaying. Then the cold. My clothes are wet. Rain. It was raining. A shiver courses through my body and the shudder brings the low-lit room into sharper focus. Blurred but less so.
My head throbs at the base. I try to touch it but my hands are trapped behind my back. I rattle my fists and feel metal around them. I’m handcuffed to a chair. A metal chair. The kind you’d find in a roadside truck stop.
My feet are bare. My clothes look dirty but intact.
The feeling of relief that brings is fleeting.
There’s a metal table in front of me, secured by bolts to the ground.
A chair like the one on which I sit is on the opposite side of the table.
A large horizontal mirror hangs on the wall behind it.
I turn my head around the room, wincing as my neck rotates.
It’s a small room. One miniscule, glassless window looks out to the dark sky.
There’s a lamp on the table giving the low hum of light. Wireless. Battery powered.
This is an interview room. An interview room similar to the room I sat in to give a statement that Saturday night in November. Except there’s rising damp here. The corners of the room are wet. Green, yellow and black. The plaster is cracked and peeling off the walls.
The heavy door opens in on the room and my heart rate doubles. I hold my breath.
‘We’ve been waiting for you to come round.’
Katrina Martin.
Oddly, her familiar face settles my pulse a notch she comes to the chair in front of the mirror. She’s been watching me from behind the wall.
‘Like it?’ she asks, sitting in a cheap black suit, legs parted in her flat, scuffed shoes.
There’s no badge on her belt and I remember that she’s been suspended. Yet a handgun is holstered on her hip.
‘Don’t fret. It’s mostly to let you know how things are going to go,’ she says. ‘As long as I get what I need, the gun stays right where it is.’
She looks tired. Worn. Haggard. Much older than her years. Older than she looked just weeks ago in Dubai.
‘Not talking? You usually have so much to say.’
My mind is still processing everything, completely drawing a blank after those words left Stuart’s lips. I’m sorry.
Stuart and Trina?
She stands now, one hand on her hip, the other turning around the room.
‘This one is a little run-down. The building’s been derelict for a long time.
But I thought it would be nice to give you a little taster.
Once you give me what I want, you’ll be in a much nicer version to make your statement against your boyfriend. ’
My throat feels like it’s being grated with glass as I speak. ‘That’s what you want? That’s why I’m here?’
She glares at me. Unresponsive.
‘You want me to tell you something that isn’t true.’
She throws her head back with a deep, menacing laugh that comes from her gut. Then she stops it abruptly, slamming a palm down on the table.
‘Except you and I both know that it is true, Scarlett. Don’t we?
’ She brings her forearms to rest on the table between us.
Her voice low and sinister as she tells me, ‘You know what makes me sick? People like you. People like your boyfriend. Gliding through life, exterminating anything and anyone who dares to stand in your way. And men. Men thinking women are nothing. Using us, hurting us. Not letting us get to where we fucking deserve in life.’ She leans back with a loud, harsh snort.
‘They say they want to put away the bad guys. Think because they have a dick between their legs, they’re better than us at doing it.
But you know what the truth is? They only want to fight the bad guys if the bad guys don’t pay.
Bad guys can’t be rich. They’re the scum of the earth if they don’t have money.
The dregs of society. If they have money, they pay to be good. ’
My shoulders ache when I hold my head up but I do because I can’t tear my eyes away from her venom. Her hatred. I can’t help but wonder what or who made her this way.
‘Do you see, Scarlett? Do you see why I have to do this? For us. For women. For the greater good of society. And you can help me. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to set right a wrong?’
I lost my hold on what’s right and wrong a while ago.
All I know now is that there are so many wrongs, the only thing to do is what feels right.
She’ll never know how much I’d like to go back.
To do things differently. But I’m not sorry that bastard is dead.
It was right to take him out of this world, to take him away from Gregory and bring him the justice he deserved for everything he ever did.
To Gregory. To Lara. To Elsa. To my dad.
Everything else that’s happened has to be right because it sent that man to hell.
‘Let me ask you something, Trina. Where do you stand on doing something that may be wrong in the eyes of the law to put right an evil? To correct something that’s morally repugnant?’
Her eyes darken and burn into mine. It resonates.
‘You think that your plan for the greater good involves putting a man behind bars for serving justice?’
‘Justice is what the law is for,’ she snarls. ‘Justice is why police walk the streets. Justice isn’t served by corrupt men.’
‘You think kidnapping to uncover a non-existent bribe is serving justice?’
She leans forward and slams the side of her fist against the metal table, the sound echoing in the room. She stands, clashing her metal chair against the mirrored wall. My blood pumps harder as she moves around the table towards me.
She takes her gun from her holster.
Air leaves my lungs.
I stare at the barrel before she raises her hand and crashes the gun across my cheek and temple, sending me and the chair slamming against the concrete floor. My shoulder burns. My head rings.
‘You said we weren’t going to hurt her.’
Feet. Converse. Combat trousers. I blink, trying to refocus, and watch Trina’s scuffed shoes storm out of the room. My breathing is erratic as the new feet move around the table towards me.
He grunts as he lifts both me and the chair back upright. Then Stuart Culliton sits onto the edge of the table, triaging at my head. I can feel myself bleeding before a crimson bead rolls down my cheek.
My body trembles. Shocked. Cold. Terrified.
He rubs his hands harshly across his face and those familiar brown eyes are full of despair when he stops.
‘Are you thirsty?’
I feel my brows furrow as I process the absurd question. Of all the things, that’s what he says. I nod, trying to understand how this boy, who’s shown moments of true sweetness, has come to sit before me now, taking a role in my kidnapping, messed up with Katrina Martin.
He reaches for a bottle of water behind him on the table. ‘Put your head back.’
I lean back, uncertain, but I open my mouth. He holds my chin as he carefully drips water into my mouth and I look into those eyes again.
‘This is not you,’ I whisper, not knowing whether he should be helping me, or who is behind that mirror.
He squeezes his eyes shut and when they reopen, they’re black. ‘You don’t know me.’ He takes the water and leaves.
* * *
I don’t know how long I’m alone. I don’t know how long they’ve had me here. Rain continues to pour outside. The night is still dark. Wind blows in through the open window and whirls freezing-cold air around my body.
‘Gregory.’ His name carries as a whisper in the room, drowned by the wind.
I know he can’t hear me. Tears mount behind my eyes.
I close my lids to stop them from falling.
They’re out there, watching me, and they won’t see me break.
Gregory will be doing everything he can to find me.
Jackson will have his team on this. I know it.
I won’t give him up. I won’t.
But as time passes and I don’t stop shivering uncontrollably, I wonder whether giving myself up is the only way to end this. Give Katrina Martin more than she bargained for. Give her the win she so desperately wants.
My teeth chatter and my head drops against my chest. My eyes close but I won’t sleep. My body wants to shut down but it can’t. They’re out there.
* * *
The door opens with the sound of metal grinding against concrete, making me raise my head from my chest. Stuart takes off his coat and wraps it around my shoulders, still warm.
I could cry out with gratitude but my throat is dry.
My entire body aches. Tears don’t come. The heat of the coat sifts into my ice-cold skin.
‘Would you undo my hands?’ I croak.
He stands on the opposite side of the table, considering me with, I think, pity, but he doesn’t move.
‘Please.’
He doesn’t glance back at the mirror, which tells me we’re here alone.
He moves to my back and unfastens the cuffs.
I whimper in pain as I move my arms from behind me, my shoulders burning through the change of position.
I bite down on my lip, raising my numb arms until I’m able to rub my aching muscles.
‘Thank you.’
He moves the chair forward from the wall where Trina left it and takes a seat opposite me. There’s nowhere for me to go. I don’t have any strength to fight and he knows it. Even if I tried to run, he’d catch me. He rubs his face. He looks young. Helpless and lost.
‘Why?’
My question doesn’t induce a reply but there’s a subtle change in him. Recognition? Regret?
‘Why?’ I ask again, louder this time.
‘It’s not about you. It’s about him.’ Stuart’s head is down, his chin angled to the floor. He mumbles as he speaks.
‘What did he ever do to you?’
His Zimbabwean twang is thick. ‘Men like him. Men who have everything. He has everything.’
‘Christ, Stuart, she’s brainwashing you. You don’t know anything about Gregory and the shit he’s been through.’
‘He worked hard for what he has, right? Don’t feed me bull, Scarlett; you’re better than that. I know what tough really is. I know what it’s like to grow up with nothing. No one.’
‘He’s dealt with more than you know and he’s been nothing but nice to you.’
‘He’s got a fuckin’ funny way of showing it.’
‘He took you on.’ I run a hand down my throat, trying to ease the pain as I speak. ‘That’s not something he’d do if he didn’t like you, if he didn’t see potential in you, if he didn’t want to get to know you.’
His body seems to soften and I allow myself to hope that I’m getting through to him.
‘We both like you, Stuart. This is not you. We can walk out of here together.’
He stands, anger raging from him as he snatches the metal cuffs from the table.
‘In front. Please,’ I beg.
He cuffs me roughly, yanking my arms forward so they’re locked around the leg of the table. I’m alone again and the coat doesn’t hold off the cold for long. My muscles shiver and my head is increasingly weary.
Think. Find a way.
He grew up alone. That’s what he’s talking about. He told us in the first meeting we had with him that he didn’t know his parents, that he’d never met them. I laugh internally. He swore on his mother’s life he wasn’t involved. Of course he did. He’s never met her.
How could we have missed that?
What else am I missing? What do I know? Trina wants a confession that Gregory and DI Barnes were involved in bribery. Stuart wants what and why? Moreover, how in the hell do they think they’re going to get what they want?