PROLOGUE

The door swung open at a touch, unlocked and unlatched, revealing a wide hallway. Dimly visible, the staircase rose from deeper in the house. There was a carpet, but its pattern was dirtied beyond recognition and the pile was matted and sticky. There was no central light fitting and the walls were scarred with pale patches where pictures had once hung, and the bloom of mildew. The whole scene was utterly bare and forlorn.

The one clump of real colour that caught the eye was a string of red, already turning brown, that ran like a thin river from just beyond the entrance to the house, through the house, disappearing into the gloominess of the interior. Silence hung in the air like a scream, and specks of dust swam through the sea of it, disturbed by the movement of the door.

A low moaning pierced the atmosphere; a spear of sound that was agonisingly loud in the dead house and drew the callers to the middle room on the right-hand side, from which protruded a lone foot, on the toe of which was a female shoe. A male counterpart was caught in a shaft of sunlight from a distant window in the depths of the large house, elevated on a step that indicated a slightly lower level in the ground floor.

Her jaw was broken, her teeth a bloody mass of stumps made jagged perhaps by the steel-capped toe of a boot, and the ends of her fingers twitched with a life of their own, but there was something wrong with her face which took a couple of seconds to comprehend. Her eyes were gone, the sockets bloodily empty.

And still her fingers twitched, and she moaned quietly, her limbs at unnatural angles.

The man’s shoe came into contact with something gelatinous underfoot and he looked down. The woman looked from the face of the thing on the floor, then at the man’s shoe, and vomited.

The man was in the kitchen, agonisingly close to the freedom of the rear door, sprawled in a pool of blood which surrounded the pile of his disembowelled insides, an expression of gut-wrenching agony and disbelief on his dead face.

The male caller half-dragged his companion into a room empty of everything except a worm-eaten wooden chair and settled her there, as a babble of voices intruded from the outside world and broke his mood of absolute horror. Putting a finger to his lips to keep her silent, although he didn’t know why, he left her and crept through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor. Apart from the room where they had found that poor wretch of a woman, there was not another stick of furniture.

He made a quick call, sotto voce, and then crept up the stairs, wary of others present but hidden, his senses heightened for confrontation, his breathing shallow and careful.

The tracks in the dust of the first floor were numerous, and the inside walls were stacked to the ceilings in each room, but this was not the only unexpected aspect of the property. Looking up the next flight of very narrow and steep stairs to the attic quarters, he unclipped the torch from his belt, for he dare not flip on a light switch in case he disturbed somebody concealed up there. A creaking tread had his heart in his mouth but no shadowy figures appeared above him.

The second floor proved as devoid of people as the first, but he was unnerved by a bright light that shone at the bottom of the three doors at the top of the staircase. Should he risk going in, or should he collect his partner and just skip it? Taking his courage in both hands, he flung open a door as a pungent aroma assailed his nostrils, and the lit space, all knocked into one huge room, revealed a complex network of hydroponics and plants. An indoor forest of money lay before him: an expanse of evil triffids that could fill the mental health wards and fatten the coffers of whichever evil bastard had planted this ‘field of dreams’.

He encountered no opposition and made no sudden movement, stunned into immobility, until the wailing scream of an ambulance siren cut through his thoughts with the precision of a lancet, and he flew down the stairs like a hunted animal.