Friday, 18 December 2015
6:21 P.M.
Overgrown ivy framed the doorway, the leaves trembling in time to the first frozen raindrops of the night.
Baxter had almost knocked twice, but her hand had been stayed by the realization that by doing so, she was instigating the bitter end of her partnership with Rouche.
Between the warped wood and the frame, a solitary slit of orange light cut through the darkness to settle over the shoulder of her jacket. She glanced at Edmunds, who had taken up position on the opposite side of the road, and smiled uncertainly before turning back to the house.
“OK,” she whispered, knocking sharply against the wood.
When there was no reply, she knocked again more loudly.
Eventually, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching across the floorboards. A lock clunked and then the door opened a few cautious inches. Baxter watched the metal chain pull taut as Rouche peered out from between the gap:
“Baxter?”
“Hey,” she said through an embarrassed smile. “Sorry to do this, but I think the traffic’s gonna be shit trying to get back into Wimbledon and I’m absolutely bursting for a wee.”
Rouche did not respond immediately, his face disappearing momentarily from view, revealing the tattered wallpaper behind and the dust particles crashing into one another in their haste to escape the dying house.
An eyeball returned to address her:
“It’s not . . . it’s not really a great time.”
Baxter took a small step forward, still smiling, as if her colleague’s cagey behavior were perfectly normal:
“I’ll be in and out. I swear. Two minutes, tops.”
“Ellie . . . She’s caught something at school and really isn’t feeling too good at all and—”
“You do remember the lift I just gave you across London, right?” interrupted Baxter, taking another small step toward the opening.
“Yes, of course I do,” replied Rouche quickly, clearly aware of how incredibly rude he was being. “Do you know what? There’s actually a Tesco just down the road. They’ve definitely got toilets in there.”
“A Tesco?” asked Baxter, unamused, edging forward.
“Yeah.”
Rouche clocked the drastic change in her, noticed the way that her eyes were searching what little space he could not block with his body.
They stared at each other for a long moment.
“Guess I’ll just head there, then,” she said, watching him.
“OK. I’m really sorry.”
“No harm done,” she told him. “I’ll be off, then.”
“Good nigh—”
Baxter lurched forward. The chain tore from the wood with the force of the impact as she shoved the door back violently into Rouche.
“Baxter!” he shouted, scrambling to push back against her. “Stop it!”
She wedged a foot between the door and the frame, and jolted when her eyes fell on the huge bloodstain dried deep into the sanded wooden floorboards.
“Let me in, Rouche!” she yelled as he crushed her boot in the narrowing gap.
He was stronger than her.
“Just leave me alone! Please!” called Rouche desperately as, with one final effort, he threw his full weight against the door, slamming it shut. “Just leave, Baxter. I’m begging you!” his muffled voice pleaded from inside.
“Shit!” she shouted when she heard the lock click again. “What happens next, Rouche, is on you!”
She kicked the blocked entrance with her injured foot before limping back down the driveway. Edmunds met her halfway up and offered her his hand, knowing full well that she would refuse it.
“Blood on the floor,” she announced.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” asked Edmunds, already making the call to the control room. It was answered immediately. “Baxter?” he hissed while cupping his hand over the speaker. “Are you sure? You can’t be wrong about this.”
She considered for a fleeting moment: “I’m not wrong. Get a team down here.”
The door surrendered without a fight, separating from its hinges in a shower of splintered wood and scattering screws. The first members of the Armed Response Unit rushed inside, accompanied by a chorus of barked orders, to secure the man sitting quietly on the bare hallway floor.
Rouche remained still, his head lowered.
“Are you armed?” the team leader yelled, unnecessarily, down at him, watching the CIA agent’s empty hands cautiously.
Rouche shook his head:
“Dismantled. Kitchen table,” he mumbled.
Keeping his weapon trained on the subdued man, the team leader sent another officer to go and check the kitchen while his colleagues moved through the tumbledown property.
Baxter and Edmunds followed the last armed officer inside, pausing on the threshold to estimate the pints of blood required to soak such a large area of floor. The broken door rocked underfoot as they crossed it and took their first breath of the stale, dusty air. A single, yellowed lightbulb swung from the ceiling, illuminating sections of the peeling wallpaper, which looked at least forty years old.
Baxter immediately felt right at home because it was the sort of place where she had spent the majority of her working life: the rotten truth hidden behind closed doors, the darkness that the veil of normality had been concealing; it was a crime scene.
She turned to Edmunds:
“I wasn’t wrong,” she told him, attempting to sound smug but unable to hide the confusing mix of relief and sadness that she was feeling.
They passed an open door to their right, where damp patches climbed the walls of the empty room. Rainwater had stained sections of the floor. Baxter moved on, stepping over Rouche in the hallway and trying to ignore the look of betrayal that he shot her.
From the foot of the wide staircase, the house looked even more derelict than it had from the entrance. Deep cracks ran up the exposed plaster. Several of the stairs were rotten through, with crude spray-painted crosses warning where to avoid placing one’s weight. On the ground floor, the scene in the kitchen looked like the aftermath of a bomb blast, resurrecting images of New York that Baxter prayed to one day forget.
“You head up. I’ll stay down,” she told Edmunds.
She stole another glance at Rouche, who was sat on the floor between them. It was clear that he had given up, sitting with his face in his hands, the back of his white shirt ruined by the filth of his own home.
As Edmunds risked his life playing stair roulette, Baxter entered the rubble-strewn kitchen. The dividing wall to the neighboring room lay in pieces across the floor. The few remaining cupboards showcased a depressing array of canned foods and packets of instant unpleasantness. Exposed live wires protruded from behind broken tiles, offering a merciful way out to anyone unfortunate enough to be faced with the prospect of a Rouche household dinnertime.
“Bloody animals,” one of the armed officers muttered under his breath. “Who lives like this?”
Baxter ignored the man and walked over to the patio doors to look out over the dark garden. She could just about make out a colorful and cared-for Wendy house, something for the ruined family home to aspire to. Long grass obscured its walls, threatening to swallow it up entirely.
Upstairs, Edmunds could hear the team searching the rooms either side of him. Entire sections of the ceiling lay fragmented and trodden into the ancient carpet, and he could hear water dripping somewhere above him. Had it been earlier, he was confident that he would have been able to see daylight shining in through the roof.
A long white wire ran across the landing to the home’s first sign of inhabitancy: an answering machine placed on the floor at the top of the stairs. An LED display flashed in warning:
Message box full
He moved on, away from his colleagues, and, with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, approached the closed door at the far end of the corridor. A sliver of light escaping beneath the whitewashed wood quickened his pulse as a familiar feeling returned to him. The door seemed to glow against the rest of the dark house, beckoning him, just as the solitary light shining down over the Ragdoll corpse had drawn him in.
He knew he didn’t want to see whatever lay beyond, but his vault of nightmares still sat relatively empty in comparison to Baxter’s. This would be one horror he’d invite to haunt him in order to spare his friend.
He braced himself, twisted the ornate doorknob, and slowly pushed the door open . . .
“Baxter!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
He could hear her recklessly negotiating the deathtrap of a staircase as he stepped back out into the corridor and gestured to the officers that everything was all right.
She came stomping over to join him: “What?” she asked, looking worried.
“You were wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
Edmunds sighed heavily:
“You got it wrong,” he said, nodding toward the open door.
She gave him an inquiring look and then stepped around him to enter the small but beautifully decorated bedroom. An intricate mural had been painstakingly hand-painted across the back wall behind a narrow bed that overflowed with stuffed animals. Fairy lights sparkled where they’d been draped over the shelves, lending a magical ambience to the rows of pop CDs.
Beside the Barbie Dream House in the corner of the cozy room, three photographs stood on the windowsill: a darker-haired Rouche smiling broadly as a gorgeous little girl laughed from his shoulders, stuffed toy in hand; an even younger Rouche and his beautiful wife holding their baby daughter; a picture of the girl in the snow, stood beside the familiar Wendy house in an unfamiliar garden. She looked to be trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue.
Finally, Baxter looked down at her feet. She was standing on a sleeping bag that had been laid out over the fluffy carpet beside the bed. Rouche’s dark blue suit jacket was folded neatly beside the pillow, obviously placed carefully so as not to disturb anything in the perfect little room.
She wiped her eyes.
“But . . . he phones them all the time,” she whispered, feeling physically sick. “She answered the phone to me and you said there was someone in when you were here . . .” She trailed off when she realized Edmunds was gone.
She picked a silly-looking penguin up off the bed, recognizing the soft toy from one of the photographs. It was wearing an orange woolly hat, much like her own.
A moment later, a woman’s voice filled the empty house:
“Hello, my love! We’re both missing you so, so much!”
Baxter placed the toy back onto the bed and listened in confusion as the vaguely familiar voice grew louder and louder until Edmunds reappeared in the doorway holding the flashing answering machine in his hands.
“OK, say good night to Daddy, Ellie . . .”
Finally, an abrupt beep signaled the end of the recorded message, leaving Baxter and Edmunds standing in silence.
“Bollocks,” sighed Baxter, marching out of the room to stand at the top of the staircase. “Everybody out!” she ordered.
Curious faces appeared in doorways.
“You heard me: everybody out!”
She herded the disgruntled officers down the stairs, over Rouche in the hallway, and out into the rain. Edmunds was the last to leave. He loitered at the broken front door:
“Want me to wait for you?” he asked.
She smiled appreciatively: “No. Go home,” she told him.
Once they were alone, she silently took a seat on the dirty floor beside Rouche. He appeared too lost in his thoughts even to notice. Without the luxury of a door, the pelting rain had started to flood the far end of the hallway.
They sat quietly for several minutes before Baxter built up the courage to speak:
“I’m a shit,” she announced decisively. “A complete and utter shit.”
Rouche turned to look at her.
“That slightly annoying, geeky, ginger guy who just left . . .” started Baxter. “He is literally the only person on this entire shitty planet that I trust. That’s it. Just him. I don’t trust my boyfriend. Eight months together . . . but I don’t trust him. I get reports into his finances because I’m so scared he’s trying to use me or hurt me or . . . I don’t even know what. Pathetic, right?”
“Yep.” Rouche nodded thoughtfully. “That is pathetic.”
They both smiled. Baxter huddled up tighter to keep warm.
“It was just after we’d bought this wreck,” started Rouche, looking around at the broken house. “We’d gone into the city. Ellie . . . She was getting ill again . . . Her little lungs . . .” He trailed off, watching the rain intensify at the end of the hall. “Thursday, 7 July 2005.”
Baxter put her hand over her mouth, the date ingrained into every Londoner’s memory.
“We were on our way to see a specialist at Great Ormond Street. We were sitting on the Tube as normal one moment; the next, we weren’t. People were screaming. Smoke and dust everywhere, scraping at my eyes. But none of that mattered because my daughter was in my arms, unconscious but still breathing, her little leg all bent out of place . . .” Rouche had to pause for a moment to compose himself.
Baxter hadn’t moved. She waited for him to continue, her hand still covering her mouth.
“Then I saw my wife lying under a pile of rubble a few feet away, where the roof of the train had come down on us. I knew I couldn’t save her. I knew I couldn’t. But I had to try. I could have got Ellie out then. People were already running down the tunnel towards Russell Square. But you’ve got to try, right?
“I start pulling at these sheets of metal that I have no hope of ever moving, when I should have been getting Ellie out instead. All that smoke and soot: she couldn’t cope. And then another part of the roof falls in, just as it was always going to. Everybody left down there starts to panic. I panic. I grab Ellie to follow the others down the tunnel when someone shouts that the tracks might still be live. Suddenly, nobody’s leaving. I know I can get her out, but I just wait there because nobody else is leaving . . . nobody.
“The crowd had made its decision, and I mindlessly obeyed. I didn’t get her out in time. I could have . . . but I didn’t.”
Baxter was speechless. She wiped her eyes and just stared at Rouche, amazed that he was strong enough to carry on after all he had been through.
“I know you blame me for leaving Curtis behind in that terrible place, but—”
“I don’t,” Baxter interrupted. “Not anymore. I don’t.”
She hesitantly put her hand on his. She wished that she wasn’t so awkward, otherwise she would have hugged him. She wanted to.
“I just couldn’t make the same mistake twice, you know?” Rouche told her, running his hands through his graying hair.
Baxter nodded as a timer switch clicked, illuminating the lamp in the corner.
“OK. Your turn again,” said Rouche with a forced smile.
“I let Wolf . . . Sorry, Detective Fawkes,” she clarified. “I let him go. I had him in handcuffs. I had backup moments away . . . and I let him go.”
Rouche nodded as though he had suspected as much: “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. Did you love him?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
Rouche considered his next question carefully before asking it: “And what would you do if you ever saw him again?”
“I ought to arrest him. I ought to hate him. I ought to kill him myself for making me the paranoid wreck that I am today.”
“But I didn’t ask what you ought to do.” Rouche smiled. “I asked what you would do.”
Baxter shook her head: “I honestly . . . I don’t know,” she replied, ending her turn. “Tell me about the blood in the doorway.”
Rouche didn’t answer her immediately. He calmly unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal the deep pink scar torn into each of his forearms.
This time, she did hug him, for some reason recalling one of Maggie’s pearls of wisdom to a distraught Finlay the night her cancer returned with a vengeance: “Sometimes the things that nearly kill us are the things that save us.”
Baxter kept the thought to herself.
“A couple of days after I got out of hospital,” Rouche explained, “birthday cards started arriving for my wife. I just sat there by the door reading through the pile and . . . I guess it wasn’t my time.”
“I drink too much,” Baxter blurted, confident that she and Rouche no longer had any secrets from one another. “Like . . . too much.”
Rouche laughed at her inappropriately cheery admission. Baxter looked offended but then couldn’t help smiling.
They really were both as messed up as each other.
They sat in a comfortable silence for a few moments.
“I reckon that’s enough sharing for one night. Come on,” said Baxter, getting to her feet and offering him one of her frozen hands. She pulled him up, took out her keys, slid one off the metal ring, and held it out to him.
“What’s this?” asked Rouche.
“Key to my apartment. There’s no way I’m letting you stay here now.”
He went to argue.
“You’ll be doing me a favor,” she told him. “Thomas will be over the moon when I tell him we’re going to play house for a little while. The cat’s already at his. It’s perfect. There’s really no point even trying to argue about it.”
Rouche got the distinct impression that was probably true.
He took the key from her and nodded.