Whispers of the Dead - Страница 53

A brass sign on it bore the legend Spa Rooms.

Paul had already started towards it when a sudden noise cut through the silence. It was like air escaping from a valve, a high-pitched keening that sounded both inhuman and agonized. It cut off as quickly as it started, but there was no doubt about its source.

It came from the spa.

‘SAM!’ Paul bellowed, and charged for the door.

I couldn’t have held him back even if I’d wanted to. Gripping the length of wood so tightly my hand hurt, I was right behind him as he burst through. There was just time to register a large room with white-tiled walls before a figure dashed through another doorway right in front of me.

My heart stuttered until I realized it was my own reflection.

A huge mirror was fixed to the opposite wall, its surface mottled and leprous. A row of drinking fountains stood in front of it, their spigots dusty and dry. A murky light filtered in through a row of high, cobwebbed windows, revealing cracked white tiles from floor to ceiling. Signs proclaiming Treatment Rooms, Sauna, and Turkish Bath pointed off towards the warren of shadowed chambers that led from the room in which we stood. But we barely noticed.

York had left his victims in here as well.

A sunken plunge pool, perhaps six feet square, stood in one corner by a darkened archway. York had turned it into a charnel pit. The bodies nearly filled it. From what I could make out, they were in varying stages of decomposition, but none so far gone as those outside.

The smell was indescribable.

The sight checked Paul, but only briefly. He quickly crossed to the doors marked Treatment Rooms and tore open the nearest one. Inside was a small chamber that must once have been used for massage. Now it was York’s darkroom. A reek of chemicals greeted us. Developing trays and containers of photographic chemicals cluttered an old desk, and more photographs had been clipped to a length of cord suspended above it.

Pushing past me, Paul ran to the next chamber. The smell told me what was inside, overwhelming even the darkroom’s pungent chemicals. I was overcome by a reluctance to look, a sudden fear of what we were going to find. Paul, too, seemed to feel it. He hesitated, his face deathly.

Then he opened the door.

More of York’s victims lay on the tiled floor, stacked one on top of another like so much firewood. They were fully clothed, apparently just dragged in here and left, as though he’d simply lost interest and dumped them in the nearest space to hand.

The body lying on the very top might have been asleep. In the dim light from the doorway, the outflung hand and spill of blond hair looked pitifully vulnerable.

I heard Paul give a sound halfway between a sob and a cry.

We’d found Sam.

CHAPTER 24

IT WAS AS THOUGH all the breath had been sucked out of me. Even though I’d told myself Sam was probably already dead, that York had no reason to let her live, I’d not fully accepted it.

I grabbed hold of Paul as he flung himself forward. ‘Don’t…’

I’d seen the photographs of York’s victims. Paul didn’t need to see Sam like that. He strained against me, but then his legs gave way. He took a faltering step backward and slid down the wall.

‘Sam… Oh, Christ…’

Move, I told myself. Get him out of here. He was slumped on the floor like a broken toy. I tried to get him to his feet.

‘Come on. We need to go.’

‘She was pregnant. She wanted a boy. Oh no, God…’

My throat ached. But we couldn’t stay there, not when we didn’t know where York was.

‘Get up, Paul. You can’t help her now.’

But he was past listening. I would have tried again, but the tiny chamber suddenly darkened. I jerked round, only to find that the door had swung shut behind us. I quickly pushed it open again, half expecting to see York standing outside. No one was there, but as the grey light from the doorway reached Sam’s body, I saw something else.

A glint of silver beneath the tangled blond hair.

There was a clenched feeling in my chest as I stepped nearer to the piled bodies. It grew tighter as I gently moved the hair aside. I felt myself sway when I looked down at the familiar face. Oh, God.

Behind me I could hear Paul starting to weep.

‘Paul…’

‘I let her down. I should have—’

I gripped his shoulders. ‘Listen to me, it isn’t Sam!’

He lifted his tearstained face.

‘It isn’t Sam,’ I repeated, letting him go. My chest hurt at what I was about to say. ‘It’s Summer.’

‘Summer…?’

I stood back as he climbed to his feet. He approached the body fearfully, as though not quite believing it even now.

But the steel ear and nose studs were enough to convince him it wasn’t his wife. He stood with the knife held limply by his side, taking in the bleached blond hair that had tricked us. The student was lying face down, her head turned to one side. Her face was horribly congested, the single bloodshot eye that was visible dull and staring.

I’d assumed Summer hadn’t come to the morgue because she was upset over Tom’s death. And instead York had been claiming yet another victim.

A tremor ran through Paul. ‘Oh, Jesus…’

Tears were streaming down his face. I could guess at the turmoil he was feeling: relief, but also guilt. I felt it myself.

He pushed past me out of the chamber.

‘SAM! SAM, WHERE ARE YOU?’

His shout reverberated off the tiled walls of the spa. I went after him. ‘Paul—’

But he was past restraint. He stood in the centre of the spa, the knife clenched in his fist.

‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER, YORK?’ he yelled, his face contorted. ‘COME OUT, YOU FUCKING COWARD!’

There was no answer. Once the echoes had died, the silence seemed to condense around us. The slow drip, drip of an unseen tap counted away the moments like a distant pulse.

Then we heard something. It was faint, the merest suggestion of a sound, but unmistakable.

A muffled whimper.

It came from one of the other treatment chambers. Paul ran and flung the door open. Battery-powered storm lanterns had been arranged around the walls, though none were switched on now. But enough light fell through the doorway to see the unmoving figure in its centre.

Paul’s knife clattered to the floor. ‘Sam!’

I groped for the nearest lamp and turned it on, blinking in the sudden brightness. Sam was tied to an old massage table. A camera had been positioned on a tripod by her head, its lens pointing directly down at her face. A wooden chair stood next to it, echoing the arrangement we’d found in the mountain cabin. Her wrists and ankles had been secured by broad leather straps, and a thinner one had been fastened round her throat, tight enough now to dig into the soft flesh. It was connected to a complicated arrangement of steel cogs from which a wooden winding handle protruded.

York’s Spanish windlass.

All that registered in the first seconds of reaching the small chamber. You’re too late, I thought, seeing the tautness of the strap circling her neck. Then Paul shifted to one side, and I saw that Sam’s eyes were wide and terrified, but alive.

Her swollen belly looked impossibly big as she lay bound to the table. Her face was red and tear-streaked, and a thick rubber gag had been forced into her mouth. She sucked in a gasping breath as Paul took it out, but the strap round her throat restricted her breathing. She tried to speak, chest working as she gasped for air.

‘It’s all right. I’m here now. Don’t move,’ Paul told her.

I went to unfasten the straps holding Sam’s ankles, and my foot slipped on something wet. I looked down and saw dark splashes pooled on the white floor tiles. Remembering the bloodstains in the ambulance, I felt cold, until I realized the fluid wasn’t blood.

Sam’s waters had broken.

I tore at the ankle straps with a new urgency. Next to me Paul reached for the windlass handle.

‘Don’t touch it!’ I warned. ‘We don’t know which way it turns.’

As badly as we needed to get Sam out of there, the windlass strap was already digging into her throat. If we tightened it by mistake it could kill her.

Indecision racked Paul’s face. He started casting around on the floor. ‘Where’s the knife? I can cut—’

An ear-splitting bellow drowned him out. It came from behind us, from beyond the darkened archway by the plunge pool. It rose in pitch, sounding barely human as it reverberated off the walls before dying away.

The distant tap dripped in the silence. Paul and I stared at each other. I could see his mouth frame a question.

Then York lurched through the archway.

The undertaker was barely recognizable. His dark suit was filthy and stained, his hair matted. The cords on his neck stood out as thick as pencils as he screamed at us, brandishing a long-bladed knife in both hands. Even from where I stood I could see the blood on it, staining his hand black in the poor light.

My limbs felt numb and heavy as I grabbed the wooden strut I’d dropped.

‘Get her out!’ I told Paul, my voice unsteady, and stepped out to face York.

He came towards me at a shambling run, roaring as he slashed the air with wild swipes of the knife. The strut seemed pathetically flimsy in my hands. Just give them time. Forget everything else.

‘Wait!’ I yelled. Or thought I did; afterwards I was no longer sure if I’d actually said it out loud.