‘Get out of here, the pair of you!’ Torgau roared. ‘Use the route. And take her with you!’
The front door shuddered at a massive impact. Torgau shouldered the rifle and fired three deafening rounds, a trio of fist-sized holes exploding through the woodwork at chest height.
His girls might be under orders not to kill Lucy, but they weren’t gentle with her. A stinging blow to the side of the face, delivered with the butt of the Browning, knocked her senseless, and she found herself stumbling across the hall between them, a hand hooked under either armpit. Meanwhile, a gunshot sounded somewhere to the rear of the house. Followed by another, and another. Lucy had heard something about shotguns. Presumably they were now being used to blow the hinges off the house’s back door.
As if realising the same thing, Torgau dashed past them along the hall. He opened fire again with the battle-rifle before he’d even entered the kitchen. The noise was cacophonous in the suburban house, the air already thick with cordite.
‘Down here, you bitch!’ Ivana hissed.
A triangular doorway had opened underneath the stairs, and Lucy was shoved towards it. Still dazed, she wondered why they were thrusting her into a closet, but then spotted the top of a staircase. A foot planted itself on her backside and propelled her forward. She tripped as she went, falling headfirst into darkness, turning over and over down the steep, stone flight. With hands cuffed behind her back, she was unable to protect herself, banging her head repeatedly, along with her spine, hips and knees. At the bottom she lay in total blackness, swooning with pain, only for a hand to slam a switch and a glaring white halogen light to come on overhead.
Despite what sounded like continuous shooting, she heard two pairs of feet thumping down the cellar stairs after her. As she came to, they lugged her upright again. A corridor of whitewashed brick, with a white-tiled floor, lay ahead. They hurried her along it, cursing and hissing at her, passing doors on the left, all partly open but all made from heavy sheet-steel. On the right, meanwhile, stood a recessed wardrobe. Its front had been disguised with fake white polystyrene brickwork, but now stood open, revealing two steel racks inside, each filled with firearms. The upper contained automatic rifles, submachine guns and pump-action shotguns, the lower pistols and revolvers. As they scrambled past, Alyssa grabbed a handgun and a couple of boxes of ammunition. Yet more gunfire thundered upstairs. It sounded like a shooting gallery rather than a family home.
‘We should be up there!’ Alyssa said, her voice cracking with emotion.
‘No,’ Ivana replied. ‘He’s not buying us time so that we can just waste it.’
Lucy, meanwhile, was now coming around properly and starting to figure things out. Torgau was right; it clearly wasn’t the police who’d arrived – they’d have given these lunatics a chance to surrender before attacking. There was likely no help to be had up there. But allowing herself to be dragged ever deeper into this stronghold of the insane made no sense at all. They were midway along the corridor, another half-open steel door awaiting them at the far end, but though the Torgau girls were fit, they were still teenagers, while Lucy worked out as well, and at thirty-two, was stronger than them anyway. She dug her feet in and brought them to an unexpected halt.
‘You bitch!’ Ivana hit her with the Browning again, smacking it across her left cheek.
Lucy responded with a head-butt, delivered right to the middle of Ivana’s nose.
Cartilage cracked, and the girl squawked. But Alyssa dug a right hook into Lucy’s lower back, specifically her kidneys, knocking her physically sick. With legs like water, Lucy sagged forward, a karate chop clobbering the back of her neck. She was so stunned for the next few seconds that she hadn’t even realised she was being dragged forward again, this time on her knees. With a clang, they crashed into the metal door at the end, which swung open, revealing a small but empty brick room. Like everything else in this extensive cellar area, it had been whitewashed, but in the centre of the floor lay what looked like a circular metal lid with a dial-type handle in the middle of it.
A manhole? Even as her senses swam back, Lucy was nonplussed. They dropped her to the floor alongside it, where she lay still, feigning semi-consciousness.
Ivana, bleeding freely from the bridge of her nose, squatted and turned the handle left and right in a sequence she’d evidently memorised. She then tried to lift the thing, but this wasn’t easy; it was more like a circular slab of steel than a regular lid. Alyssa helped, all the time keeping the muzzle of her pistol jammed into Lucy’s neck. Together, they got it upright, a stale reek wafting free. Lucy glimpsed the hole underneath. At first, she was perplexed. It was about two feet across; perhaps half a foot down there was a polished crossbar of tubular steel, and below that a similar tubular bar, this second one descending into pitch darkness like a fireman’s pole. But only when Ivana put the cardboard cylinder down, letting it drop into the blackness, did Lucy realise what she was seeing.
This was it. The route.
Though how she was supposed to get down there with her hands cuffed behind her back, she didn’t know.
‘Just drop her,’ Ivana told her sister, wiping at her nose with her sleeve, smearing red all over her once pretty face. ‘So what if she breaks her fucking legs?’
Alyssa snickered, tucking the gun into the waistband of her shorts so that she could grab the hostage with both hands. Lucy knew that this was the sole opportunity she would get, and so, with the sort of Herculean effort only the truly desperate can muster, she swung her torso upward, slamming the flat of her left foot on the floor, and levering herself upright on one leg.
‘Fuck!’ Alyssa shouted, trying to grapple with her.
Lucy kneed her in the groin. It was a better tactic against male opponents, but it still had the desired effect, Alyssa doubling forward, gasping. Ivana, hunkered alongside the hole, tried to grab her legs, but Lucy kicked at her, knocking her sideways, and then turned and, still with hands cuffed, bolted out into the corridor.
She ran down it pell-mell.
Ivana shrieked incoherently, coming out behind her.
Lucy could sense the gun levelled on her back. But before they could fire, a figure came stumping down the stairs ahead of her. She slid to a halt, blinking through her sweat. It was the unmistakeable form of Martin Torgau. He stood as though barely seeing her, the battle-rifle hanging by his side. He was swaying, she realised, face milk-white, eyelids fluttering.
She looked down at his chest, where blood seeped from eight or nine minor puncture wounds. When he pitched heavily forward, smacking the tiled floor with his face, the jagged meat and bone of the exit wound in the middle of his back was the size of a dinner plate.
More heavy feet came clumping down the stair behind him.
Blocking her escape.
Bone-weary, still dazed from the blows she’d taken, Lucy sank to her knees and slumped against the whitewashed bricks at the side of the passage. As she did, she glanced behind her. Ivana and Alyssa were both at the far end, framed in the doorway to the manhole room. They’d levelled their pistols at her but hadn’t opened fire. Instead they stood stock-still, faces blanched, mouths agape.
Their father had just died in front of them.
Then another shot was fired, this time from the direction of the stairs. An almighty shotgun blast. Lucy felt the pellets whistle over her head and saw them rip their way along the wall, exposing streaks of red brick beneath the white.
The Torgau girls darted backward, slamming the steel door. A second load of shot hammered into it, denting it, punching multiple holes. A bulky figure, clad all over in black, wearing black gloves and a black balaclava, strode past Lucy, a pump-action levelled in his fists. He’d clearly seen her, but for the moment was more focused on his official targets, the Torgau twins. The third shot he fired slammed the steel door open, buckling it in its frame, but the room behind it was empty, the lid still upright on the manhole.
As though in a dream, Lucy looked the other way again, towards the foot of the stair, where a second figure, similarly clad to the first, had also come down. He’d seen her as well, but at present was ignoring her. However, he too carried a pump and, as he walked past Torgau’s body, he casually unloaded a round into the back of its head, which from that range blew it apart like a water melon, blood and brains splurging across the white-tiled floor. He halted just in front of her. She sensed the first one coming back, and all she could do now was lower her head and screw her eyes shut.
‘Fucking thing leads down to the sewers,’ the first one said. ‘Sodding maze down there. They’ll be well away.’
‘All right. We got the main target.’
‘Yeah, but here’s another for the fucking pot.’
Lucy tensed, as the first one worked the slide on his weapon – clack/clunk – and she sensed him squinting down the barrel at her head.
‘Please … please …’ she whimpered. ‘I’m not, I’m not one of—’
‘Wait!’ a third voice bellowed. ‘Not that one.’
Slowly, hardly daring to believe it, Lucy opened her eyes.
Again, sweat blurred her vision, but she was still able to focus on this third person, who had also come down to the bottom of the cellar stair. He too was armed with a shotgun, and clad in black from head to toe, but he was distinct from the others because while they were average-sized, he was a giant, towering almost to the ceiling.
There was no argument. The two gunmen ignored Lucy, sauntered back along the passage with weapons by their sides and tromped upstairs. The giant stood to one side, watching her as she knelt amid the smoke and blood. Lucy couldn’t make eye-contact with him. There was too much distance between them, and she was too tired and hurt to scrabble any closer. But she knew Mick Shallicker when she saw him.
All her police life, she’d never thought she’d be so relieved at the sight of that towering, ruthless maniac.
Her head sank down for a second, her neck too weary to hold it upright.
When she finally managed to look again, he’d gone.
Cedar Lane was filled end to end with police and CSI vehicles – aside from the area immediately in front of No. 27. That and the house itself, including the drive, garage and front garden, were doubly taped off.
Curtains twitched continually as neighbours regarded every coming and going with utter astonishment. Lucy Clayburn, though, was less captivated. She watched it with dull, tired eyes, barely registering the Tyvek-covered examiners on the other side of the tape, some in conflab with Serious Crimes officers, others taking photographs, others on hands and knees as they examined the ground. Only when Detective Superintendent Nehwal emerged from the entry tent, having stripped off her own Tvyek and thrown it into the dirty-box, did Lucy straighten up.
She’d been leaning against her car, which remained where she’d parked it earlier. A sheet of survival-foil hung from her shoulders, where a medic had previously placed it. He’d wanted to take her away in the ambulance because he felt that she was going into shock, but Lucy had replied that she was fine, and rather snappily, had told him to stop fussing. It wasn’t her normal style, but her inner turmoil was becoming too much, overwhelming all sensibilities, all inhibitions. Beyond this point there lay nothing but serious damage.
‘One hell of a strange house,’ Nehwal said, handing Lucy her car keys. ‘Looks as if Torgau completely refitted the cellar area, but … I mean …’ It was a rare occasion indeed when Priya Nehwal wrestled to find the adequate words. ‘We’ve got gym equipment in some of the rooms, torture devices in others. We’ve got medical texts detailing human anatomy, stockpiled CDs, which on first glimpse seem to comprise military training techniques … SAS, Navy Seals. On which subject, there’s a whole arsenal of illegal weapons. One room’s like a prison cell … I hate to see what we’ll find in there when we get the luminol out. There’s even a Tannoy system and video links connecting it all together.’
‘So the teacher could watch as they practised,’ Lucy said, half to herself. ‘And offer guidance.’
Nehwal regarded her carefully. ‘You say this lunatic had been training his two children to murder?’
‘To be Bill Pentecost’s personal murderers,’ Lucy replied tiredly. ‘And torturers. And believe me, ma’am, they’ve got the energy for it if not the skills. Which is why, until we snag them both, we’ve still got a major problem on our hands.’
‘Two nineteen-year-olds?’ The DSU sounded unconvinced.
‘You’ve every right to be doubtful, ma’am,’ Lucy said. ‘But it looked to me as if Martin Torgau taught them almost everything he knew. Or was in the process of that.’
Nehwal appraised the cosy-looking house. ‘Still waters running deep, eh? Whoever attacked the place … that was clearly a professional hit. You say you thought there were three of them?’
Lucy tightened inside. Because this was it. Whatever this moment brought, there was no way around it – and maybe no way forward afterwards.
‘I saw three, yes. And I think I recognised one of them.’
Nehwal looked slowly around. ‘You recognised one of them? Who was it?’
Lucy knuckled her eyes. In normal circumstances she’d be furious to find tears there. Hardened coppers didn’t cry, not in public. But this situation was beyond abnormal.
‘I know you’ve just been through an ordeal,’ Nehwal said, ‘but try and think clearly. If you can identify one of these killers …’
‘Ma’am, there’s something I have to tell you.’ Lucy swallowed bitter saliva. ‘It’s very serious.’
‘Okay.’
‘Two years ago, during the Jill the Ripper investigation, I discovered something. It’s very personal, but I have to tell you.’
Nehwal nodded slowly. After thirty-plus years as a cop at the sharp end, she knew when she was on the verge of something momentous. She tapped the bonnet of Lucy’s Jimny. ‘Get in the car. Tell me everything.’