THERE WAS a second when Darian thought Vinny was going to swing for Simon, staring at him and reaching out a hand to a terrified man with lungfuls of smoke. Simon pulled back but Vinny only put a hand on his shoulder. From a distance it might look like a friendly gesture, but Vinny Reno had been a cop in Whisper Hill long enough to know how to make things look like something they weren’t. Vinny was a barrel-chested bruiser and the hard grip of the shoulder was a reminder of how close the big hand was to Simon’s throat.
Vinny looked him in the eye and said, “Where is she? What happened?”
“Nothing happened to her. Nothing happened because Will and I weren’t willing to let it happen.”
He was shaking his head and looking scared, a man with an answer to a question that hadn’t yet been asked. Simon Sutherland wanted to explain everything despite Freya being unaccounted for. Vinny wanted his ex before the story.
“Where is she?”
“I own number fourteen. She’s in number fourteen, Auri, just down the street on the other side of the road. It’s smaller, but it’s, I suppose, reasonably okay. I’ve never been in. I own it, though. She’s in the basement.”
Vinny looked at him and then at Darian and Sholto.
Darian said, “We’ll go, come on, we’ll go.”
Simon said, “Wait, there’s a lock, it’s a security thing. I had it put in on the basement. You’ll need the code. Three, zero, zero, one. That’s to the basement. There are keys for the gate and doors but they’re in there.”
They all followed his watering eyes back to the only place he had called home, the only place he had ever accepted and ever wanted to be, now turning to charred steel and ash in front of him.
Sholto said, “Go, you two, go, I can’t handle falling over any more fences. Go, and I’ll keep an eye on…”
He trailed off. His eyes flitted across to Harold Sutherland, to Phil Sutherland standing near his uncle with an uncertain look.
Darian and Vinny set off running down the drive and Darian was, within ten yards, reminded that he had just breathed in a lot of smoke and been burned and was exhausted. He coughed when his legs tried to go up through the gears and he had to slow down and spit some dark and ominous-looking phlegm onto the drive. He turned to see Sholto stopping Phil from trying to join them: no Sutherland welcome. Vinny didn’t have enough sympathy to slow down but thundered on past the fire engines and down to the gate. Darian picked up the pace and turned left to head down Geug Place, narrow and with high trees and bushes on either side. In the daylight it was a picturesque way to make it feel rural, the walls shrouded in greenery, but at night it made identifying the numbers on the gates difficult. Darian saw Vinny ahead, slowing to check the number on one of them, then running on to the next.
They had turned the slight curve in the road and were toward the bottom of the lane when Vinny stopped and said to Darian as he caught up, “This one. This is it. Give me a leg up and I’ll pull you up after me.”
“What? I can’t get you up that high.”
“Aye, you can, stand against the gate, back straight, knees bent. Hurry up, Darian.”
He cursed under his breath, but he did as he was told. Darian did his best, which wasn’t easy because he was weakened and Vinny was a heavy old beast. It hurt like hell, Darian could feel his legs begin to buckle. Vinny stepped up onto Darian’s shoulder, Darian wincing in pain. Then nothing. Vinny was up and grabbing the spikes at the top and pulling himself up.
Now for the reason that Vinny had gone first. He reached a hand down for Darian, who had to take a run-up to grab it but when he did it was as if he was weightless. Vinny lifted him up in one swinging movement and then Darian was grabbing the spikes and pulling himself over. They both lowered their weight and had to drop the rest of the way, hitting the cobbled ground and falling over.
They ran up a short drive to a house smaller than Simon’s. This one was two stories of traditional gneiss, a little smaller than the original Sutherland home would have been before the extensions. The size mattered nothing to them, but they both noticed the darkness and emptiness of it.
Simon Sutherland had said he owned it and that he had never been in it, and it didn’t look like anyone else had either. High walls surrounded the garden and that was just enough to hide the jungle it had become from the neighbors. The grass was thigh-high and the weeds taller, and even in the moonlight Darian could see the clumps of moss sticking out of the drainpipes and clinging to the roof, more weeds reaching out between the cobbles beneath them. They went to the wooden front door and Vinny looked in the small window before trying the handle to find it was locked.
He said, “What do you think?”
“I think you’re a cop and you put doors in all the time. Add another to your list.”
Vinny had never lived his life waiting for second invites, so he put his shoulder to the door and hammered into it. It didn’t budge an inch, didn’t even rattle.
He grunted. “That’s not a normal door. Reinforced, I think.”
“We need something to smash it with, force our way in.”
If there was anything useable in the front garden it was buried under the grass and in the darkness they couldn’t go feeling for it. They ran around the side of the house. Nothing there. Then to the back, a long garden running down toward the edge of the loch, a mesh fence around a large flat stone at the water’s edge, a piece of history few understood and they had no time to look at.
“There. Birdbath.”
Darian had spotted it, the top peeking out over the long grass around it, a stone circle that looked weighty. Vinny went across and grabbed it, tried to lift it but struggled. Darian helping, they shoved it, rocked it back and forth until it came loose and Vinny picked it up. With it on his shoulder he started running, straight to the back door of the house and charged it, assuming it was as secure as the front door. The first time it buckled but it didn’t open. It needed a second run-up, all of Vinny’s weight and the impact of the birdbath to smash the door around the multiple heavy locks and get them in.
The second the door burst open an alarm started screaming, loud enough to wake the dead in Heilam cemetery across the loch. Vinny tossed the heavy birdbath onto the pavement running around the side of the house. Ignoring the alarm, they carried on into the house. Vinny was a cop and they were doing the right thing so neither feared the law.
They found themselves in a long, empty, dark corridor with a hard wooden floor that seemed to stretch the length of the house with a staircase at the head and doors on either side as you went along it. In a horror movie it would be the scene where a door would suddenly open and something awful would leap out, and Darian wasn’t ruling out that happening here. The whole house had the atmosphere of a trap. With the pulsing screech paining their ears they walked halfway down the corridor until they saw a small light: a security box on a door that surely led to the basement.
They stood beside it and Vinny pressed three, zero, zero, one and then enter, and everything changed. The alarm shut its damn mouth and the door clicked open a fraction, enough to show them a line of light. Vinny pulled the door open and they were standing at the top of a flight of stairs leading to another door. They walked down and found it was heavy, metal, but the same code that had unlocked the one at the top of the stairs had opened this one, too. They pulled it open and they found her.
The basement was large and well furnished; they could see a sofa and a TV, a table and a bed, and a small kitchen, all in the one open space. There was an open door through which they could see a shower, and they could guess a toilet, too. A light was on and a woman was standing in the middle of the room looking nervous.
She recognized Vinny and said, “Oh, thank God.”
Freya ran across to him and they hugged. Darian was taking in the room and trying to examine Freya without it being obvious. There were no noticeable marks on her, cuts or bruises, but that confirmed nothing.
Vinny said, “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay, bored and frustrated but I’m okay. What the hell took you so long, I was expecting you ages ago?”
“What the hell…? I’ve been turning the city upside down trying to find you, that’s what.”
“Twelve days, Vinny. Some cop you are.”
Darian smiled. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Freya said, “Oh, yes, I could use some fresh air.”
“Won’t be that fresh, it’s full of smoke out there.”
On the way to the door Vinny paused and looked behind at the basement, saying quietly to Darian, “Bloody hell, it’s bigger than my flat, and a lot better equipped apart from no phone or wi-fi, and even with them my signal’s patchy. I mean, I’m not saying I’d ever want to be kidnapped, but if it had to happen this is where I’d want to go.”
“Yeah, they were well prepared.”
They walked up the stairs and through the darkness to the front door. In the vestibule Darian found the keypad to unlock the front gate and they made their way down the lane.