All thoughts of trees and metaphors disappeared abruptly when Vince opened the door to one of the rooms. And there they were. Women. Jackson counted seven, in various states of disrepair, doped up to the eyeballs and handcuffed with plastic ties. He could detect the ferrous smell of fresh blood. The place felt like an ante-room to an abattoir.
‘I’m going to phone the emergency services, is that okay, Vince?’ he said. Best to let a man with a gun think he was in charge. Because, let’s face it, he was.
‘Not the police though,’ Vince said.
‘The police are what’s needed, Vince. I can count at least three major crimes taking place here, and that’s without the guy you shot.’ Jackson felt as if he’d spent the last twenty-four hours trying – and failing – to persuade people to reach out and grasp the hand at the end of the long arm of the law.
‘No police,’ Vince said calmly. ‘I’ll see to it.’
See to it? What did that mean? Jackson wondered as he pushed nine three times on his phone. ‘No signal in here,’ he said to Vince, holding up his phone as if to demonstrate. ‘I’m just stepping out into the corridor, okay?’ Jackson wasn’t about to let the emergency services walk into an ambush. Vince had already shot one person, who was to say he wasn’t prepared to shoot everyone? To go for the classic murder/suicide blaze-of-fury ending and take everyone down with him like a kamikaze pilot.
Cupping the phone in his hands to muffle the conversation, Jackson recited his old warrant number to the dispatcher, hoping it wouldn’t be checked. It was a crime to impersonate a policeman, but in the hierarchy of crimes much greater ones were being committed all around him. Unfortunately the dispatcher’s voice at the other end started to break up and wander off into the ether, and the game was up when Vince appeared at his side. ‘You didn’t ask for the police, did you?’ he asked, motioning Jackson back into the room with the gun as if he was directing traffic.
‘No,’ Jackson said truthfully, ‘I didn’t.’
Jackson went round with his trusty Leatherman, slicing through the plastic ties. The girls were nervous of him, and of the knife, and he kept saying, ‘It’s okay, I’m a policeman,’ which seemed more positive than the past tense, although it hardly made any difference to them as English wasn’t their first language. His tone of voice seemed to soothe them eventually. He checked for injuries. Mostly bruises, the kind you got from being beaten. Jackson thought of Crystal Holroyd and the blows she had taken yesterday. It still made him wince to remember it. He couldn’t imagine that she knew about this place, that she knew how Tommy made the money that allowed her to live in a style that she had not been accustomed to before she met him. He liked to think that she was one of the righteous.
Vince holstered his weapon casually, tucking it into the back of his belt while he gave the girls water and murmured, ‘You’re safe now, don’t be afraid.’ Jackson eyed up the gun. How quick on the draw would Vince be? he wondered. Would he really shoot him? Watching the way he gently tended to the girls, it seemed unlikely, but was he prepared to take that risk?
They worked like battlefield medics – swift but steady. The room did bear a resemblance to a war zone. One more battle in the war against women.
A tale as old as time. Disney, Jackson thought. He had watched Beauty and the Beast with Marlee on a Blockbuster video when she was little. (Video! Dear God, like something from the Ark.) And now she had met her Prince Charming, was about to bite into the happy ever after. The poisoned apple. (Why can’t you be pleased for me, Dad? What the hell is wrong with you?) Marlee was twenty-three, she could easily be one of the girls held captive in Silver Birches. These girls all had stories – lives, not stories – yet here they’d been reduced to anonymous commodities. The thought made his heart hurt. For them. For all the girls. All the daughters.
Jackson had one ear out for the sound of approaching sirens, but could hear nothing but silence. He kept finding himself kneeling in blood, sticky, fresh stuff that didn’t belong to the girls. The man Vince had shot, presumably. Andy. Tommy and Andy and Steve. The