Читать книгу Dark Winter Tales: a collection of horror short stories - Paul Finch - Страница 8

In some ways, Blair McKellan’s escape from Lowerhall was a godsend for Sharon.

Okay, it could never be good for anyone that a six-time killer was on the loose with an apparent agenda to continue the same grisly rampage that had seen him confined in the first place, and it especially couldn’t be good for the police officers who were likely to have to pick up the pieces. But Sharon was getting to the stage where she needed more from Geoff Slater than a simple tumble in the back of his CID car, and this incident ought to create sufficient time and space for them to at least discuss it.

That said, in the first instance McKellan would cause nothing but problems. Sharon had just commenced the night-shift when the call came through. The sound of sirens echoing across the darkened sea and the flashing glare of searchlight beams emanating from the distant, high-walled structure on the South Shore headland was immediately sufficient to attract patrols from all over St Derfyn Bay. When news broke that it was Blair McKellan, and that he’d gutted one of the guards while making his escape, patrols had come dashing from neighbouring divisions as well, and even neighbouring force areas: Dyfed-Powys in the south, Merseyside in the north.

Of course, as a relatively junior officer, still with only a couple of years in the job, there wasn’t much that Sharon could really do. She drove warily up South Shore Drive, the airwaves crackling incomprehensibly as radio messages rocketed back and forth, the black October sky reflecting the innumerable searchlights. But she’d only travelled half a mile before reaching the first roadblock. Somehow or other, PSUs had got there ahead of her. Two of their armoured troop-carriers sat at angles across the blacktop, their complement of tough guys standing around in visored helmets and Kevlar plate, some clutching PVC riot shields and hickory night-sticks, others – indicating that one of the carriers was in fact an ARV – with pistols at their belts and carbines across their chests. Local supervision was also on hand. Sharon saw Inspector Marquis in deep conflab with a man wearing the pale-grey helmet and body-plate of the Lowerhall security team. Beyond the scene of chaos, the road curved on along the rocky coast, spangled all the way with spinning blue beacons.

A leather-gloved hand rapped at her window. She powered it down, admitting the face of Section Sergeant Pugh. He was a pale, severe looking man with short-cropped iron-grey hair, lean features and prominent cheekbones. Such a visage wasn’t made for smiling, which was a good thing as he rarely did.

“What are you doing here, PC Jones?” he enquired.

“Wanted to see if I could be of assistance, sergeant,” she replied.

“Well, as you can see … the world and his brother have taken charge of this situation.” He sniffed disapprovingly, never having been one to hold faith in specialist outfits like Tactical Support or Firearms Response. “Get back to the town centre please, and cover your beat until further notice. And if anyone else thinks they’re going to toddle up here and spend the rest of the shift drinking coffee and chatting to their mates, you can tell them otherwise.”

She nodded, powered the window up, shifted gear and spun the car around in a three-point turn. This was just what she’d been hoping for.

En route back to town, she passed another local patrol easing its way along South Shore Drive. She flashed her headlights and the vehicles pulled up alongside each other. It was PC Mike Lewton and his young probationer, Rob Ellis. Lewton was burly and black-haired, with a thick moustache, pitted cheeks and a flattened nose. But he wasn’t the brute he looked and was usually good for a giggle. Ellis was younger, and even more fresh-faced than Sharon, but with a shaved head and jug-handle ears, there was something vaguely comical about him.

“Don’t tell me,” Lewton said through his open window. “Pugh wants us to pick up the scrag ends?”

“No work for us up there,” Sharon said. “That’s only for the big boys.”

“Probably nothing to do anyway. Just come over the FR that McKellan’s lifted one of the asylum security vehicles. He’ll be halfway down the A470 by now.” Lewton pondered and shrugged. “Alright, no worries … see you later, Shaz.”

As expected, on returning to town Sharon copped for three jobs straight away. Routine calls had been backing up while the emergency on South Shore had been occupying the airwaves. The first was a complaint about a bunch of yobbos playing football against someone’s front door, the second was criminal damage to a car, and the third a burglary. They each took her progressively deeper into what was known as the ‘Back End’ of town, where blocks of scabby flats and rows of run-down terraced houses alternated with boarded-up pubs, sex shops and tattoo parlours. This was the sort of seedy district that the holiday programmes rarely focused on. Not that St Derfyn Bay featured very regularly on holiday programmes these days. Who actually came to the seaside for a holiday in the twenty-first century? Perhaps there were one or two, but Sharon rarely saw them.

When she was a little girl, the town’s seafront, which followed a slow, gentle curve of nine miles all the way from North Shore to South Shore, had seemed magical to her with its array of whitewashed, neatly-aligned hotels and guesthouses, its nautical-themed pubs and cafes, its theatres, casinos, pleasure palaces and amusement arcades, all done up in rainbow-hued neon. The neon was still there, loops of fairy lights suspended above the prom. The prom itself was a pleasant enough stroll on a nice sunny day, but there was more litter around now than Sharon remembered, while a lot of the hotels had closed or been given over for the use of the DHSS. Sharon was only twenty-four, so in truth things probably hadn’t been a lot better when she was a child – she certainly had no memories of the so-called golden age of the British seaside – while the close proximity of Lowerhall Psychiatric Hospital, a glowering edifice of black brick, originally constructed as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Napoleonic era, had always cast something of a shadow. But she never recalled St Derfyn being quite as down-at-heel as it seemed to be at present. The town’s former pride and joy, the Jubilee Pier, was still in use, but the pastel blue and pink colours with which it had originally been painted had long flaked away, leaving it a drab, skeletal grey, while the assortment of joke shops, puppet shows and postcard stands that had once made it such an attraction had long gone. Now there was only a tea-room at the end of it, and usually a bunch of desultory, middle-aged fishermen perched on the barriers, most of whom would be lucky if they caught anything other than a pair of dirty underpants or a used condom.

In actual fact, neither the beach nor the sea were in a particularly grubbier state here than anywhere else along Britain’s west coast, but in poor weather, which seemed to be the rule rather than the exception these days, it made a bleak picture. It was difficult to imagine that Bubbles still lived off this coast. He was the mythical sea monster who’d supposedly been tamed by the original Derfyn back in the age of the Welsh saints, and had allegedly been sighted a few times since, on several occasions during the 1950s as a mass of bubbling turbulence several hundred yards offshore; investigating scientists had later explained this as harmless natural gases escaping from the seabed, but schoolchildren had preferred to think of it as their friendly local sea monster blowing bubbles. The name had stuck and he’d become a mascot for the town in its heyday, his smiley crocodile head omnipresent everywhere, from the hoardings of fish-and-chip shops to balloons being sold on the sands.

Of course, Bubbles was a name from the past now. Much like the town itself.

Once Sharon had dealt with the burglary, she emerged from the Back End and was dispatched to a drunken dispute on the prom itself. She attended this scene with some minor trepidation, but she didn’t expect the worst. It was midweek, and so was unlikely to be the usual story of a visiting stag party falling out with a posse of local cowboys. In fact, when she got there it turned out to be three retired men arguing about a disputed bowling score from earlier that afternoon. As soon as her white Opel Corsa complete with its Battenberg flashes pulled up, the anger drained out of them, and with all parties advised (and sent home with tails between legs), Sharon was at last able to concentrate on her real plans for this evening.

When she checked her phone, she saw that Detective Sergeant Geoff Slater had beaten her to it, having texted her over half an hour ago. His message read:

Circus on South Shore – North Shore seems a plan.

Fun Land could be fun tonight.

Fun Land, St Derfyn’s once-famous amusement park, was a good choice for three reasons. Firstly, as it had been closed since 2003, no-one went there anymore, apart from the odd tramp or drug addict, so privacy was nearly always assured. Secondly, thanks to the Diffwys and Cadair Idris massifs lowering over the north end of the bay, it was a radio black-spot; few messages were deliverable to or from North Shore without chronic interference, so if Comms called her or Sergeant Pugh wanted a meet, she’d have plenty reason not to immediately respond. The other reason of course, as Slater had said, was that with South Shore the current focus of attention, North Shore would be quieter than usual – and it was quiet at the best of times.

There was no better personification of St Derfyn and all its problems than Fun Land. As Sharon drove up there, the quality of the buildings on the seafront declined, the faded guesthouses giving way to derelict shells. There were still kiosks and cafes on the sea wall, but they were more like rabbit hutches, sealed up with wire mesh and corrugated metal. A couple had even been torched, as had Captain Flint’s Tavern, the last pub on the last corner before the gates of Fun Land. As a child, Sharon remembered it teeming with customers – usually dads and granddads, whetting their whistles while mum and grandma took the nippers into the amusement park. Now its red-brick Georgian edifice was black and scabrous, its famous mullioned glass windows, what remained of them, hidden behind a fence of faceless wooden slabs.

There was plenty of opportunity for Sharon to leave the car at the front. There were no parking restrictions because, as a rule, no-one wanted to park, but it seemed a risk – it would be just like Pugh to make a pointless drive-by and ‘catch her shirking’. Instead, she cruised down a side street towards the park’s rear, its south boundary delineated by an eighteen-foot wrought iron fence. Only darkness lay beyond this, the relics of rides and attractions visible as shadowy, shapeless outlines.

Fun Land had once been a huge draw for tourists from South Wales and the Valleys, but mainly from the English Midlands. While Rhyl catered for Liverpudlians, Blackpool for Mancs and Morecambe for Scots, St Derfyn had found itself inundated each summer by Brummies, but the amusement park had eventually closed as part of the general downturn in fortunes suffered by the British seaside. By the 1990s fewer and fewer people were visiting it, and an increasingly rough crowd spoiling the atmosphere for families had led to the introduction of an entry fee, which had killed off even more custom. As a result there was under-spending and so dilapidation set in. A succession of miserably wet summers was the final straw, and even the ubiquitous Bubbles, who’d featured on billboards all over the park, and had walked around it every day in June, July and August, an actor enclosed in an ingenious rubber sea monster suit, complete with a bubble-blowing machine installed in his grinning, crocodilian snout (the bubbles emerging from his nostrils), hadn’t been able to reverse that. When Fun Land had finally padlocked its ornate scroll-iron gates for the last time, there’d been a promise that new investments would be found at some point, and a revival project put into motion – hence the lack of demolition work – but there was no sign of that yet. Rumours abounded that the site was now for sale, but if so, no-one wanted to buy it.

To its rear there was an open space about the size of two football fields. This had formerly been a car park, but was now a wasteland of gravel and cinders. The odd forlorn structure remained: an abandoned caravan; a roofless brick shack that had once been a public lavatory. Geoff Slater’s motor, a white Toyota Esprit, was also there – sitting unattended next to Fun Land’s rear fence.

Sharon surveyed it through her headlights. It was tempting to park up alongside it, but again there was a worry that someone might happen along – not necessarily Sergeant Pugh, but maybe one of the other patrols. Then the idle tongues in the office would really wag, even if she hadn’t had something going with the tough, handsome detective. In many ways Slater was a good catch, but she’d told herself again and again that it was a mistake to get involved with a married man. The moral issue nagged at her, not to mention all the practical day-to-day frustrations inherent to being ‘the bit on the side’.

She depressed the accelerator and veered away. On the face of it, it seemed a bit pointless parking elsewhere – what matter if they were one yard apart or a hundred? It would still be obvious they were here together. All she could do was park the Corsa out of sight, so she pulled up leeward of the derelict toilet block, hoping that it would mask her from the road. She switched the interior light on and briefly assessed her makeup in the sun-visor mirror. She was a good-looking girl and always had been. There was something of the feline about her: green eyes; delicate, diagonal brows; a small, sharp nose; pink lips. Whenever she took off her ridiculous uniform-hat and unpinned her black hair, it fell in a lush wave to her shoulders. Oh, she had lots going for her, except that she didn’t have Geoff Slater. Not totally. Not yet. And this was something they had to sort out tonight.

Checking she had her mobile and all her ‘appointments’ – her cuffs, baton, CS canister and torch – she climbed from the car, replaced her yellow ‘high visibility’ coat with a normal black anorak, and attached her radio to its lapel.

She locked the vehicle up, and walked around the toilet block towards the Toyota. It seemed odd that Slater wasn’t here, waiting for her. She reached his car and peeked inside; from the blipping red light on its dashboard, it had been secured properly.

Peering across the windswept waste, nothing stirred – just a few rags of litter tossing on the sea-breeze. She pulled on her leather gloves as she looked to the fence. An explanation as to why Slater had chosen this exact spot suggested itself; at some time in the past a couple of railings had been bent apart, presumably by kids, and there was now sufficient space to slide through. Not that she had any idea why Slater would actually have wanted to enter the park. She fished out her phone and keyed in a quick text.

Where R U?

There was no immediate response, which there probably wouldn’t be given the poor reception in this area. She pocketed the phone, and approached the gap, sliding through it shoulder-first and emerging in a passage between two sheds, at the far end of which a rubbish bin lay overturned, disgorging a mass of refuse so old that it had coagulated into a solid mass. Sharon stepped gingerly around this, and entered the park proper. As her eyes hadn’t yet attuned, its variety of once brightly coloured attractions was still a clutter of brooding, featureless structures. The breeze stiffened, droning between wires and girders and loose sections of clapboard, which tapped in response. To the west, she could make out the high gantry of the Crazy Train.

There was a creak directly behind her.

She spun around, torch in hand, beam flicked on full.

The loose shutter creaked again on the shed to her left.

A sign overarched what had once been its open frontage. The jolly crimson paint now turned to grey, read: Hoopla. She glanced at the shed on her right: Buffalo Bill’s Shoot ’Em Up. A rifle range. The frontage to this one was still open, tatters of blue and white striped awning hanging down over it. Again, the question bugged her: what was Slater up to? Had he got wind that she was after some kind of commitment from him? Was he playing a stupid trick? Overhead, the moon slipped out from the clouds – a reduced oval, but it cast a welcome silver glow, embossing the tarmac footways snaking between the attractions, though of course it created deeper shadows too, blotting out some buildings entirely, cloaking the black, throat-like alleys between them.

When Sharon suddenly heard a shrill clarion call, she almost jumped out of her skin. Swearing, she retrieved the phone from her pocket. The return text said:

Here. Where R U?

“For Christ’s sake,” she murmured, keying in a quick response:

Where is here?

Need a location

While she waited, she walked. She’d last been in here as a young teenager, and possessed no real knowledge of the park’s layout, so she ambled in a vague northerly direction, trying always to keep the open sky over the sea on her left, though as she had to turn a few corners to do this, it soon became confusing.

She eased the volume down on her radio. She hadn’t heard anything on it for quite a while, most likely because of the mountains; if not for that, she was certain the incident on South Shore would have kept the airwaves busy. But even so, she didn’t like the idea that a sudden burst of static might announce her presence. This was a habit she’d fallen into while making night-time property checks; it was far better to catch the felons in the act than alert them you were coming. Of course, at this moment she wasn’t trying to stop anyone doing something they shouldn’t – it was the other way around, she thought guiltily.

She passed the Flying Teacups on her right and the Surf Rider on her left. They were grim relics of their former selves: jibs hanging, cables trailing. From what Sharon could see, any attempt to regenerate the park in the future looked doomed to fail. Everything she saw here was broken, begrimed, gutted. Where the Dodgems had once collided in time to a coordinated dirge of all the latest pop songs, silent emptiness yawned under a rotted iron pagoda. The billboard on top of it had once advertised the latest shows at the Fun Land Emporium; now it hung charred and soggy. In fact, arson looked to have been the sole reason anyone had visited Fun Land in the last few years. Though the lower section of the Downhill Racer was caged off, its main tower had been reduced to blackened bones, while a flame-damaged effigy of Bubbles wearing a scarf and bob-cap and holding a pair of skis, which had once stood on top of this, lay on the footway.

A short distance on, she accessed a timber boardwalk, which thudded loudly as she strode along it. This was partly due to the empty space underneath. It was one of the unusual features of Fun Land that, to facilitate drainage of the autumn rains or spring melt-water from the heights of Diffwys and Cadair Idris, numerous channels had been tunnelled underneath the park, leading eventually to the sea. Back in 1920, during construction, the park’s original designers had made a special feature out of this: the Fun Land Marina had been built. This was a deep, octagonal harbour, about sixty yards in diameter, into which numerous of the drainage channels discharged, their vents carved into dolphin heads or the mouths of tritons and sea gods, but more importantly, from which motorised mock-Venetian gondolas would take paying guests out along the so-called Royal Canal for a ride around the bay, calling eventually at the Jubilee Pier, where they would ascend via a special stairway decked in a red carpet, then walk about for a bit and presumably buy a different brand of candyfloss from that on sale in the park.

Sharon crossed over the Marina via an arching metal footbridge. Rather to her surprise, the tide lapped against the aged pilings below. If nothing else, she’d expected the Royal Canal to have bogged itself up by now, but apparently not. There were even a few boats on view, though most looked like hulks banked in silt. As she reached the far side, a second clarion call announced that she’d received another text from Slater.

Haunted Palace

“What?” she groaned. “What the bloody …”

A voice she didn’t recognise replied to her.

Sharon turned, surprised. The bridge arched away through moonlight. No-one else was standing on it.

“No-one,” she said.

The voice replied again, apparently mimicking her.

It was a long half-second before she realised she was hearing an echo, probably from underneath the bridge. Even so, for the first time her thoughts strayed away from what she wanted to do here onto whether or not this was a good idea.

Despite the moonlight, everything was so black and still. On all sides, the jumbled silhouettes of gantries, domes, wheels and monorails blocked out the horizon, reminding her how deep inside the park she was. She wouldn’t easily be able to find her way back, and in addition she was now expected to locate the Haunted Palace. Enough was enough. Rarely in this relationship had she and Slater spoken to each other on their own mobiles; they didn’t have a particular rule about this – it was just that texting was simpler. But now she called him and waited impatiently while the number rang out – until it switched to voicemail.

She rang him again, and again. On both these occasions it switched to voicemail.

So it was the Haunted Palace. Bloody great! Snatches of childhood memory recollected dark tunnels, staccato lights, booming laughter. Not the most salubrious venue for romance.

Not that she felt like giving him any.

She pivoted around, finally spying what looked like a set of battlements protruding above the Pancake House, and sidled towards them, glancing over her shoulder as she did – again she thought she’d heard something, though it was probably another echo. She zigzagged through a labyrinthine section, which had once been nicknamed the Shambles because it was basically a market filled with novelty stands, ice cream vendors and the like. It also contained the Gobstopper, an attraction that had freaked her out a little even as a teen. It comprised a row of clown heads and torsos – minus limbs – mounted on metal poles, each with a gaping mouth to serve as a target. Contestants stood behind a counter and pelted them with hard wooden balls, the idea being to get as many as you could through the open mouth of your particular clown and down into its belly. With each clean hit, the eyes would light up to the accompaniment of bells, whistles and hysterical ‘Daffy Duck’ giggles. Sharon had thought it an odd-looking thing even back then; she’d never been able to shake off an impression that the dummy clowns were screaming – and even now as she walked past the row of de-limbed figures, still sitting motionless under their canvas awning, she fancied their ink-black eyes were following her.

When she emerged in front of the Haunted Palace, it was initially no more than a gothic outline in the gloom, yet in that strange way of long-ago familiarity, it all seemed so recognisable. It was easy to recall the wild screams as one car after another shunted its way up the access ramp and vanished through a pair of huge, nail-studded doors. The Palace itself was mock-medieval, sponge rubber and fibreglass doubling as heavy stonework, but when she shone her torch at it, she saw that it had decayed badly. Its griffins and gargoyles had dropped off, and fissures had snaked across it, exposing the framework underneath.

Of course there was no sign of Slater.

Sharon stood by the barrier and phoned him again. Still it went to voicemail. “Geoff!” she said under her breath. And then, because frankly she couldn’t take much more of this: “Geoff, where the hell are you?”

A voice replied. At first she thought it was another echo, though on this occasion it sounded as if it had come from inside the Haunted Palace. She ducked under the barrier and stood at the foot of the access ramp, on which only eroded metal stubs remained of the rail-car system. The door at the top stood ajar.

Finally, she ascended. It had definitely sounded as if the voice had called her by name. So it was Geoff. But if so, why didn’t he come out? She approached the door, the glare of her torch penetrating the gaunt passage beyond but revealing very little. When she entered, it stank of mildew. The ghostly murals that once adorned the fake brick walls had mouldered to the point where they were unrecognisable. She ventured on, turning a sharp corner – no doubt one of those hairpin bends where, for their own entertainment, everyone inside the car would be thrown violently to one side – and stopped in her tracks.

A tall figure stood in the dimness, just beyond the reach of her torchlight.

“Geoff?” she said, in the sort of querulous tone the general public would never associate with a police officer on duty.

The figure remained motionless; made no reply.

“Geoff?”

Still no reply; no movement. She advanced a couple more steps, the light spearing ahead of her. And then a couple more, and finally, relieved, she strode forward boldly.

It was a department store mannequin, albeit in a hideous state: burned, mutilated, covered with spray-paint. Up close, its face had been scarred and slashed frenziedly; for some reason, she imagined a pair of scissors. When she tried to shove it aside, it swung back and forth. Glancing up, she saw that it was hanging by a wire noose, which, even given everything else that had been done to it, seemed a little OTT.

Another thought now strayed unavoidably into Sharon’s mind, one that perhaps had been lurking on the periphery of her consciousness for the last few minutes.

Blair McKellan, the ‘Night Caller’; a maniac who, for twelve terrible months in the north of England, had broken into homes during the early hours and, using whatever household utensils he’d found, had slaughtered the families sleeping there.

But it was impossible. McKellan had stolen a security van from the asylum, which meant he’d be far to the south by now. There was no possibility he could have driven north from Lowerhall; he’d have had to come through the town itself, which would have been too much of a risk.

Vandals were responsible for the mannequin. Some bunch of stupid kids who had nothing better to do. But of course that didn’t explain the voice she’d thought she’d heard, or why Geoff Slater wasn’t here. Sharon made an effort to steady her nerve. More than likely those two mysteries were tied together. When she’d been a probationer, Slater had been one of several old sweats to play elaborate tricks on her – setting her up with a hospital visit for ‘a prisoner with a crippling foot injury’ who’d actually been an off-duty CID man under orders to dash off at the first opportunity, running her all over the hospital grounds. All the newbies were treated that way, but of course Sharon had been singled out for special attention because she was good-looking. Even now Geoff adopted the air of a guy who never took life too seriously, but surely he was past this kind of nonsense? Especially when she’d intimated that they had important stuff to talk about?

Suddenly irritated as hell, she stalked back to the front of the decayed building, kicking her way outside into the fresh air. She stabbed in another text message:

Stupid game

Not impressed

Heading back

It was more gung-ho than she felt, mainly because she wasn’t sure it would be as simple as ‘heading back’ – she didn’t know in which direction from here the gap in the fence actually lay – but also because she’d really wanted to sort something out tonight. All day she’d been psyching herself up to having this conversation; when she’d seen his Toyota and realised that he’d got here ahead of her, she’d felt certain they were about to resolve the problem. And now he was acting the goat.

That was when she saw him.

Or someone.

It was no more than a speck of movement in the corner of her vision. She squinted, and saw that she hadn’t been mistaken. A couple of hundred metres away across the park, a diminutive figure was plodding along one of the high humpback gantries of the Crazy Train. Sharon was astonished. She wondered if she was seeing things. But there was no doubt – someone was up there, a tiny shape picking its way along the track. A wino or drug-addict? Possibly. They came here from time to time and dossed down, but would they climb to the top of an edifice like that? Could they climb?

Of course not. It had to be Slater.

But again that question: what the heck was he playing at?

She tried calling him again. As before, it went to voicemail. This time she left him a message: “Am I actually watching you on top of the roller coaster? If it isn’t you, there’s someone else here, and that can’t be good, can it? Call me back ASAP. And please, please … stop fucking around. This is serious.”

She glanced again to the distant gantry. The figure was no longer visible.

As baffled as she was unnerved, she walked over in that direction. Again, she had to sidle down passages between empty shacks that had once been stalls, and along tunnels piercing the guts of vast skeletal structures, which were all that remained of world-famous white-knuckle rides. At the foot of the Flying Teacups there was a deafening shriek, and a seagull with a wingspan of nearly three feet burst out through the long-smashed window of the booth and swerved around her, beating the air hard, before lofting upward and vanishing.

Sharon was still shaken from that experience when she arrived at the Crazy Train. Its waiting area lay beyond a wire-mesh fence, and was only accessible via a turnstile, which she now had to climb over. Beyond this, the temporary crash-fencing, which she remembered being arranged in rows so that riders could queue in orderly fashion, had been flattened. She stepped over it as she approached the loading platform. The moment she got up there, a figure was awaiting her with a grinning sickle of tight-locked teeth, but it only made her start for a second. In fact it was two figures, one standing in front of the other, and thankfully both were made from hardboard.

The taller one at the back was Bubbles, hence the toothy smile. The smaller one was a teeny boy in a stripy t-shirt. A notice above them read:

Unless you’re at least as tall as Johnny here,

sorry … you can’t ride!

When she passed into the loading area proper, it was like a small railway station, the track-bed lying between two separate platforms where riders would either climb aboard or disembark. In either direction, only a matter of yards from the overhead canopy, the track, which was largely still intact, its rails gleaming with moonlight, rose up out of sight, though when she looked down from the platform’s edge, she saw large gaps where the various cogs and gears comprising the brake-run had long ago been removed. An ugly black emptiness lay underneath those.

She moved first to the north end of the platform, and gazed up the shockingly steep incline. Its uppermost rim, perhaps a hundred feet overhead, was framed against the moonlit sky, but no figure was silhouetted there.

“Ridiculous,” she said under her breath. “What the hell am I even doing here?”

She strolled the other way to the south end. From this direction, the track rose in a more gradual ascent, before levelling out at about fifty feet and twisting away. But this time she had to blink – she couldn’t be sure, but fleetingly she’d fancied there’d been movement; a tiny blot slipping out of sight.

This was nonsensical. Whoever it was, he couldn’t have seen her down here … could he? If he had seen her and had ducked away, might that be because he was trespassing and she was a cop? Okay, perhaps it wasn’t Geoff Slater – maybe yet another stupid teenager. Perhaps one of the firebugs who’d visited so often in the past?

Either way, it was time to assert herself.

She climbed down onto the track-bed. From here, she had to take extreme care as she advanced, balancing on the rails and sleepers, avoiding the black emptiness occasionally lying between. When she reached the foot of the incline, it was hemmed in on either side by steel-mesh netting, but at least she had a clear view up to the top. And if nothing else, all this gave her a good story.

“That’s right, sarge. I was driving past Fun Land – no reason really, just routine – and I saw a figure on the Crazy Train gantry. I tried calling for support, but got no response on my radio. Black spot, isn’t it?”

“Hello!” she called, waving her torch from side to side. “This is the police. You’ve got one minute to get down here, or I’m coming up after you.”

There was no response.

“I’ve got more officers on the way. We’re going to clean you lot out of this place.”

She expected nothing this time either, least of all the echoing metallic clack that half made her jump. Sharon strained her eyes as she peered up the timber gradient, its two rails again glinting. That had sounded suspiciously like some kind of gear being thrown. Even as she watched, another dark blot materialised against the skyline, but this wasn’t a figure – it was square and bulky, and it quickly vanished again, drawing numerous other squarish shapes behind it.

A slow panic went through her as she realised what this was.

Through fleeting patches of moonlight, she glimpsed a line of jostling carriages rushing downhill – right towards her. She stumbled helplessly backwards. But the platforms were several dozen yards behind her, while steel mesh hemmed the narrow track in, so she couldn’t even jump to the side. Sharon screamed as the speeding locomotive filled her ears with its ear-splitting clatter – and then dropped.

The train rattled by overhead as she plummeted through moon-stippled darkness for what seemed an eternity, and yet when she landed and the breath whooshed out of her, it was relatively easily – on a mound of wet sand.

Sharon lay groggy for a moment or two, vaguely aware of a series of explosive impacts overhead. Only long after this uproar had ceased did her surroundings swim into focus: a vast, empty space forested with pillars and supports, moonlight glimmering through it in crisscrossing shafts. Slowly, still dazed, she sat up. Similar dunes to the one she’d landed on stretched out around her, streams of water meandering between them. When she glanced overhead, she saw that she’d fallen about twelve feet, so it was fortunate indeed that she’d landed on sand. But no sooner had her scrambled thoughts reordered themselves than a particularly chilling one came to the fore.

The Crazy Train had rolled downhill because it had been pushed.

That was the only explanation. In the initial frenzy of her thoughts, she’d assumed that some kind of vibration might be responsible; that she’d triggered the coaster’s descent by trespassing on the aged, flimsy structure. But on reflection that was quite ludicrous. It had to have been done manually. And would a bunch of vandals really do that when they knew a copper was waiting at the other end? Would they stoop to murder?

“Geoff …?” she mumbled, hardly able to give full voice to the notion. She glanced around again. Her eyes didn’t penetrate the further depths of these sandy, salt-smelling chasms. There was no sound, save water dripping from rotted woodwork or jagged, rust-eaten metal.

Geoff was her lover, and a great card in the office – but he was also a ruthless operator. He’d planted more than his fair share of screwdrivers to get villains sent down; several times he’d been investigated for alleged brutality. Murder wouldn’t be too much of a leap for him. But why? Just because he’d had enough of his mistress? Because she’d been going to ask him to ditch the mother of his children?

Sharon spotted an upright ladder about thirty yards to her left. She hobbled towards it, one hand planted on her hip, which she’d clearly bruised during the fall.

Had Geoff got sick of her? And was he so much a shit-heel that rather than break it off and risk having a woman scorned muddying the waters for him, he’d try to kill her?

On the face of it, it seemed preposterous. But Geoff had asked her here, and yet hadn’t responded coherently to any of her messages. She glanced over her shoulder as she reached the ladder, checking that she hadn’t dropped her baton or CS canister. She continued to glance back as she scrambled up the rickety iron rungs, this time to ensure no-one was encroaching from behind. And then another thought struck her, and this one was such a shock that, briefly, she almost lost her perch.

Had someone been sitting in the front carriage of the Crazy Train?

It seemed incredible, and yet she’d kept replaying the incident in her head, and in that last petrifying second, as the train flitted through that final patch of moonlight, she could have sworn there’d been someone riding in the front of it.

She hung there in the half-dark, thinking hard, gradually convincing herself that she hadn’t been mistaken. There was no doubt. Whoever had pushed the train downhill, they’d jumped on board to hitch a lift. Which, as the roller coaster track wasn’t functioning properly anymore and as there was no braking system left, meant they’d been dicing with suicide. So surely it could not have been Geoff Slater?

At the top of the ladder, she emerged through a square manhole into a dusty kitchen-like room, which astonishingly still smelled vaguely of hotdogs and onions. Through a broken window, she saw that she was just across the footway from the Crazy Train pay-booth. When she crossed towards it, she had baton in hand, snapped out to its full one and a half feet of flexible alloy. Warily, she re-ascended the ramp, and found the station area thick with dust and wood-splinters. She wafted her way through this, baton braced against her right shoulder.

“Geoff? You here?”

As the dust cleared, she saw that all twelve carriages had derailed on the other side of the station, plunging part way through its cage-work support structure. The train’s inverted wheels still turned as the bulk of it lay arched and twisted over the track.

There was no sign of a body or any kind of movement, from what she could see – and she was damned if she was getting any closer – but if someone had ridden the coaster down from that perilous height, it could not have been Slater? It had to be someone else, someone with an absolute death-wish.

She leaned to the radio on her collar, knowing that failure to call this in wouldn’t just be remiss of her, it would be an abrogation of duty. By instinct, she adjusted the volume control – and only now noticed that the device had been muted. On first entering the park, she’d turned it down low, but had not thought to turn it back up again later. She swore as she adjusted it, and immediately heard a crackle of static, and caught some cross-talk from elsewhere on the Division.

“That’s confirmed,” came the voice of Comms. “It was reported that McKellan had removed a vehicle from the Security Pound at Lowerhall. It wasn’t specified at the time that he’d removed one of the offshore patrol boats, over.”

There was further chit-chat, much of it incomprehensible, the messages broken, distorted. But Sharon was no longer listening.

A boat?

The Night Caller had removed one of the asylum’s boats?

She turned dazedly in the direction where she thought the Marina lay. It was a hideous thought, but in a speedboat he could have crossed St Derfyn Bay and moored amid the grimy ruins of Fun Land in next to no time. And yet – she glanced again at the piled-up wreckage of the Crazy Train. Deranged or not, Blair McKellan couldn’t have survived such a crash.

On the verge of panic, she slid her baton away and scampered down the access ramp onto the footway, trying to get a radio message out, but almost immediately losing her reception again. She swore aloud, but when a piercing clarion call sounded from her pocket, snatched at her phone.

What game?

She tried to ring Slater again. It went to voicemail. Turning the air blue, she tapped in a quick message.

Meet up now

McKellan in park

Maybe dead or injured

Call me!!!

But he didn’t call. And she very quickly began to wonder at the wisdom of her last message. That was a hell of a thing to have told a fellow copper. Suppose Slater spread the word, and the whole circus headed over here, allowing the real killer to get clean away? She had not seen a body, she reminded herself. She couldn’t even be sure that someone had been riding the coaster. Again she wondered if she might have tripped it herself. Or what about the bunch of kids she’d initially suspected? She’d had enough, she realised. This was going nowhere. She tried to call Slater again, but the call failed. She keyed in another text:

Heading back to car park

C U there

She’d no sooner sent it than something creaked behind her. She twirled around, and initially the breath caught in her throat – but then she realised what she was actually seeing.

Across the footway, in the recess between the Hotdog Kitchen and the Penguin Skittles, stood something like a children’s theatre: a small upright cubicle made of timber or fibreglass. A pair of shutters that once enclosed the tiny stage had swung open, presumably in the breeze, revealing that a life-size figure was standing behind them. But it was the usual thing – Bubbles, probably an animatronic version, looking more than a little mouldy and saggy, his scaly hide mottled, his eyes like ragged holes in rotted fabric, his crocodile snout deflated.

Sharon ignored it, glancing back to the topmost tier of the Crazy Train, straining her eyes one last time for trespassers. It didn’t feel like the done thing, heading away from this place when there may have been a fatal accident here, but regardless of the Geoff Slater fiasco, she needed to get the word out. There was no-one up there she could see, so she turned and walked away, passing the children’s theatre on her left – and noticing from the corner of her eye that it was empty.

She stopped in mid-stride and pivoted around to face it.

At first she thought the Bubbles dummy had maybe slipped down out of sight. But how come the side-door to the theatre now stood open?

And then she sensed a figure on her left.

She pivoted again.

In its present state of decay, the Bubbles costume was quite the most revolting thing she’d ever seen, hanging raddled and desiccated on the strangely emaciated form inside. His right hand was raised, causing Sharon to involuntarily giggle as she remembered the way Bubbles used to wave to the cameras with his right hand as he walked through Fun Land on hot summer days, hordes of gleeful kiddies trailing after him.

But this time he held something in it.

It looked like it was made of steel; it also looked heavy and very sharp.

Even when she blasted him in the face with her CS agent, he swung this massive implement down – this cleaver, or whatever it was – aiming squarely at the side of her neck. With barely suppressed shrieks, she ducked away, jetting the CS spray into his face a second time, and hitting him dead-on – though perhaps the costume headpiece was masking him, because he spun after her, slashing again with his razor steel, knocking off her hat, her hair uncoiling every which way. She drew her baton again, snapping it open, trying to fend him off, but another arcing swipe caught it mid-stem, severing it in two. Blindly, she struck out with a different weapon – her torch, and this blow landed. The bulb audibly shattered on impact with her assailant’s head, but it also drew a grunt from him and he staggered.

Sharon used the opportunity to run – in no particular direction.

“PC requires,” she gibbered into her radio. “PC requires. Fun Land amusement park. Blair McKellan is here. I need back-up urgently … I repeat, urgently!”

As before, there was no response. She turned along a side-passage, and found herself amid metal struts and under tarpaulin roofs. She was back in the Shambles, she realised, which surely was somewhere she could lose the bastard? She took turns at random, hoping to throw him off, constantly glancing behind, seeing no-one in pursuit – only to find herself confronted by the Gobstopper, its broad front standing open on the darkened recess in which the mounted clown figures were just vaguely visible.

Her mind raced, thoughts tumbling over each other.

There’d be missile weapons in there, of a sort – those hard wooden balls. Okay, they didn’t signify deadly force, but they would pack a wallop. She clambered over the counter and into the space behind, where she crouched low and fumbled on the floor, eventually finding two of the missiles – though they seemed much smaller and lighter than she remembered. Once in possession of them, she waited and listened, struggling to stop her teeth chattering. For a few minutes, even the wind seemed to drop – the only sound was Sharon’s heart thundering in her chest as she scanned the surrounding maze of stands and stalls, through which moonlight spilled in various fantastical forms, making it difficult to maintain depth or perspective.

Nothing seemed to move.

Had she thrown him off? She hardly dared consider the possibility. No-one could second-guess a monster like Blair McKellan, the Night Caller; an out-and-out madman who left his victims like sides of butchered meat. But surely he wasn’t completely demented? He’d retained sufficient of his faculties to lie low between kills, to evade the law for almost a year. If he’d identified her as a police officer, as he surely must, he’d be expecting her to call this in? Assistance would be en route. He’d be better running.

A few dozen yards away, a figure emerged through the moonlit haze.

Sharon sucked in a breath so tight it almost squeaked. She sank lower, only her eyes visible over the counter-top. But no … now that she looked carefully, it wasn’t a figure, it was just an awning, patterned with mildew, rippling in the stiffening breeze.

She allowed herself to breathe again, filching the phone from her pocket. She would try Slater one more time. It seemed futile, pointless, but he was the closest to her, the only person who could provide immediate assistance. She prodded in his number – and immediately froze as she heard a tinny tune somewhere in her vicinity. It sounded like jazz; low, sleazy jazz played on a sax. And she recognised it.

Slowly, incredulously, she turned around, riveting her eyes on the dummy clown directly behind her … except that, now her vision had attuned, it didn’t even resemble a clown. Or a dummy. True, like the others it was only a torso; the legs and arms were missing, and the mouth yawned open to impossible width, and it sat upright on a metal pole, though possibly in this case that was because the pole had been jammed ten inches or so into the object’s anus.

A warm trickle soaked Sharon’s knickers and the crotch of her trousers.

What she’d first taken for clown make-up streaking the figure’s cheeks wasn’t anything like make-up; and those eye sockets, which now contained nothing at all, let alone electric bulbs, would never light up again. In the gaping mouth, where once there’d been a tongue, sat a small, flat device, juddering its jazzy tune – until it switched abruptly to voicemail.

Sharon had some vague thought that it was a good job she didn’t still have her torch. Because the last thing she wanted to see were the finer details of this atrocity. Even so it transfixed her. She could do nothing but sit there gawking – until she tasted something salty dripping down the front of her face and onto the tip of her tongue. Dazed, she craned her neck back to gaze overhead – and saw a massive rent in the canvas awning, into which a distorted figure was leaning, staring down at her. The fluid dripping from the end of his hanging snout was probably tears, or saliva, or nose mucus, or a combination of all three – a product of the spray she’d hit him with earlier.

There are times in every police officer’s career when all sense of authority and decorum is lost. When you cease to be a stern pillar of law enforcement, and revert to your natural state: a frightened, vulnerable animal whose main instinct is to run.

This Sharon now did.

With hysterical shrieks. Throwing herself over the counter and haring off along the footway, blathering incoherently into her radio – even though she expected no response.

Again, she ran in no particular direction, blindly, exhaustedly, threading between the stands and stalls, through moon and shadow, until she reached a broad thoroughfare, which, more by instinct than logic, she felt would lead her to the park’s entrance.

It did. Right up to those towering, scroll-iron gates.

They were closed of course. And locked.

The chains holding them were thick with corrosion, the padlock fused into a lump of impenetrable rust. Sharon yanked on it futilely, tearing her fingernails, before glancing back. A figure approached along the main drag; at first it looked distant – was only visible through the intermittent patches of moonlight – but very quickly it assumed those grotesque quasi-reptile proportions. Its faltering, lumbering gait was also unmistakable; as was the glint of steel in its clenched right hand.

With more breathless shrieks, Sharon ran back into the park, veering right when she spied an open doorway. She had no idea what to expect beyond it, but immediately found herself in a complex network of passages, smoothly glazed walls encompassing her from every side. Phantom Sharon Joneses leapt and cavorted, bodies elongated, heads expanded; illusions rendered even more demonic by the refracting moonlight. Not that twists and turns were a problem for her pursuer. Somewhere close behind, mirrors exploded one by one as he put his shoulder to them. Billions of fragments rained ahead of his wild, bullocking charge. Sharon attempted the same, arms wrapped around her head. Despite her stab-jacket and the thick tunic beneath, flecks of glass wormed their way under her collar and cuffs, cutting, stinging. When she blundered through one already-broken frame, a hanging shard of glass drew a burning stripe across the top of her head, though in truth she barely felt this. She snatched the shard down; it was twelve inches long and shaped like a dagger – its edges sliced into her fingers, and yet she clung onto it.

With hot blood dribbling into her eyes, she hobbled left, groping along a side-passage that seemed to lead to brighter moonlight, so desperate to reach this that even when another mirror disintegrated in front of her, and a brutal form blocked her path, she drove straight on.

Perhaps McKellan was more surprised than she was. He had a weapon, but now so did Sharon – and she was the one who struck first, plunging the shard into the top right side of his chest, puncturing the rumpled costume and the human tissue beneath – the glass grating on bone as she drove it deep, to half its length at least, before lodging it fast. Her foe made no sound but reeled backwards, allowing her to shove past him and head on to the light, which, as she’d hoped, turned out to be a window. She kicked it until it fell to jangling pieces, and clambered through.

After the hallucinogenics of the Mirror Maze, the moonlight outside brilliantly bathed another thoroughfare lying straight and open. She’d staggered fifty yards along it, mopping blood from her brow, before glancing back. McKellan had emerged behind her, but now was toppling sideways rather than following. Even as she watched, he fell heavily to the tarmac.

She turned to run on, and slammed into a massive, iron-hard body.

Sharon screamed and lashed out with her fists, before strong, gloved hands caught hold of her wrists. Through fresh trickles of blood, she gazed up into the saturnine features of Sergeant Pugh.

“What the devil … PC Jones, what the …?”

“McKellan,” she whispered. “It was Blair McKellan … he killed DS Slater …”

“Slater … Blair McKellan?”

“But I killed him!”

“What …?” Pugh looked perplexed. “What are you talking … what happened?”

Aware that she was ranting unintelligibly, she tried to explain, not even attempting to conceal the nature of her relationship with the late detective. Halfway through, Pugh – looking very alarmed – checked the gash on her scalp, and after mumbling something unsympathetic about it only being a flesh wound, strode back along the thoroughfare, ordering her to stay close.

“No!” she yelped. “I’m not going back there!”

“Pull yourself together, girl! You’re supposed to be a police officer!”

She stammered out a few more semi-coherent objections, but the sight of Pugh, stern as ever, unimpressed by anything, seemed to restore a half-sense of normality. And in any case, McKellan was dead. He had to be.

“How many other units are attending?” she whimpered, following from a distance.

“None, as far as I’m aware.” Pugh’s features tautened as he spotted the shape lying on the tarmac ahead. “No-one even knows where you are. It’s pure good fortune I swung by North Shore and spotted your vehicle.” He hurried forward, speaking urgently into his radio. Though Sharon fancied she heard a fizzing of static, she didn’t hear anyone at Comms respond. He tried again as he knelt beside the casualty.

She halted a few yards away and held her breath.

Wasn’t there a lack of blood? She’d stabbed McKellan deeply, and yet there was no blood spattered across the footway. How much of what she’d penetrated was McKellan, and how much was monster suit?

And where was the shard she’d used?

That last question struck her like a mallet.

She’d left it jutting from beneath the killer’s collarbone. Yet it wasn’t there now – because it was in his left hand.

Sharon watched as, in seeming slow-motion, that long bayonet of glass plunged up and around, striking Sergeant Pugh in the left eye. By the time the steel blade appeared and sheared into the side of Pugh’s neck, she was already running again. She only looked back once – but this was sufficient to show her supervisor’s limp corpse being whirled around like a rag doll and launched into the Mirror Maze through its demolished window. It was also sufficient to distract her so that she blundered headlong into a low barrier, fell over it and landed upside down in a litter-filled concrete channel.

The blow to her already-wounded cranium was dizzying, but her adrenalin kept flowing, pumping her full of energy. As awareness seeped quickly back into her head, she sighted the costumed horror approaching the other side of the barrier. She lurched to her feet and staggered along the channel, following it through an arched entrance into another indistinguishable building. She ran blindly again, hands out in front. A single backwards glance showed an ungainly silhouette coming relentlessly in pursuit.

From the next corner, she spied a downward shaft of moonlight. She tottered towards it – only to be stopped short by a fearsome face apparently suspended about twelve feet in the air. Heart-pounding moments followed before she recognised it as the face of an Aztec god, and realised that she was in the River Caves. What was more, now that her eyes were attuning, she saw a framework of scaffolding standing alongside the statue. At the top of this, some kind of trapdoor hung open. Without thinking, she climbed. He would know where she’d gone – the hollow bars rang and echoed – but would he be able to follow her in his monster get-up?

At the top, Sharon hauled herself through the aperture, which in fact was an old skylight, and found herself on a sloped roof greasy with moss. She slipped as she tried to turn around, landing heavily on her bruised side. As she lay winded, she peered down into the darkened interior. His twisted form was already ascending the scaffolding with no discernible difficulty. Just like he’d ridden the Crazy Train. Just like he’d survived a deep stab wound in the chest. It was impossible, it made no sense – but it was happening.

Weeping at the unfairness of it, Sharon tried to scrabble down the roof on her buttocks and ankles, but gravity took over and she began to slide, rocketing over the edge and dropping a considerable distance before hitting another, lower roof. This one, apparently consisting of plywood and tar-paper, simply collapsed underneath her, jarring her left ankle and turning her upright again as she fell through it. Some seven feet below, her injured ankle blazed with even more pain as she hit a solid, cage-like frame, which possibly had once contained a motor or generator.

The collision flung her sideways onto an old mattress made sodden with decay – at least, she thought it was due to decay.

She sat bolt-upright as she realised that she wasn’t in this dingy place alone. The moonlight shining through the shattered roof revealed a figure seated on the floor against the wall opposite – though the destruction wrought on this poor soul made even the combined agonies of her lacerated scalp and sprained ankle dwindle. Whoever he had been, someone had hacked and slashed his face and throat to a ghastly ruin. Sharon scampered away crablike, hands sliding in pools of clotted gore, clattering through empty bottles and cans, only to slam into a second figure slumped against the other wall. This one had been propped up in a musty sleeping bag; as it now fell over her, its head detached and bounced into the shadows.

Whining and weeping, scrabbling through newspapers and rags all slimy and foul, she wriggled free and had to use a wall of rubble-cluttered shelves to drag herself to her feet. Dust and cobwebs plumed into her face, clogging her nose and mouth. There was a thunderous impact on the roof, and splinters erupted downward. A black shadow blotted out the moonlight.

Gasping, she flung herself around the walls, trying to find the door, hammering into more obstructions, jolting her injured ankle, barking her shins. She twisted as she tripped, grabbing at another shelf. It tore away from the wall, showering her with bric-a-brac, which she wildly rummaged through, seeking any kind of weapon she could find. But all that came to hand was something like a stiff tube of plastic with a grip on one end. The idea struck her that, if all else failed, she could jab this at her tormentor, maybe take out his eyes the way he had taken out Slater’s.

Dear God, Dear Christ … Geoff!

There was another heavy impact, this time on the floor behind her. She spun, hefting the ridiculous tube as though it were a knife – and only then, in the better light, realising what it actually was. Even as she did this, the interloper rose to his feet and turned his crazy, crumpled face towards her – and lunged.

More by luck than design, Sharon fell to one side, the blade bypassing her and striking a large plastic object in the recess behind. Whatever this was, it burst apart, gouts of fluid exploding over Sharon, but also drenching McKellan, sloshing not just down his costume but around his feet. The chemical stench of it brought immediate tears to her eyes – diesel. The maniac had ripped into some kind of fuel container.

She scrambled back across the room on all fours, now through a slurry of mingled blood and oil. The blade slashed over her head as McKellan twirled, gashing a huge chunk from the wall.

The door, where was the fucking door?

Clambering over a corpse, she saw it: an upright crack of light. She jumped up and threw her shoulder against it. It shuddered in its frame, but resisted. With hoarse screams, she scrabbled for a lock, sensing the presence turning around behind her. She found the latch, lifted it and yanked the door open. As she did, she spun back, pumping her thumb on the plunger built into the handgrip of the butane candle lighter.

It had to work, it had to work …

But it wasn’t doing.

Until a tiny flame suddenly spurted to life at the end of the tube.

Sharon flung it at the monstrous vision – which in less than one second was engulfed in a curtain of roaring flames.

She tottered outside, still whimpering, still weeping, beating down on herself, imagining that she too had caught alight. Only by a miracle, it seemed, had she avoided this, but still she wasn’t safe – she expected a fiery figure to come surging out. But if McKellan tried to do that, he failed, perhaps stumbling against the inside of the door, which now banged closed, entrapping what looked like a raging inferno inside the small outbuilding. Its grimy windows quickly blackened and shattered. Its wood and tarpaper exterior was already smouldering, flames licking out through every crevice.

Sharon continued to back away, not quite believing that her ordeal was over. As the fire spread over the hut’s exterior, it burned so fiercely that the heat of it dried her tears, seared her sweat-sodden cheeks. And then a hand landed on her shoulder.

She squealed as she spun around – only to see the brutish, baffled features of Mike Lewton, with Rob Ellis standing a few feet to one side. Their patrol vehicle was parked behind them. Lewton still held the bolt croppers with which he’d managed to secure access through the front gates, but he almost dropped them with shock when he saw the state Sharon was in: her hair a tangled mop of gluey blood, her face equally stained but also dirty, wild-eyed.

“He’s … he’s in there,” she stammered shrilly, gesturing at the hut.

“What? Who is, Shaz?”

She shook her head dumbly, unable to say more.

The men pushed past her towards the blazing structure. Much of the hut’s combustible material had been consumed, and the small building was now in the process of collapsing on itself. Flames still blazed at ground-level, but otherwise only a bare, blistered framework remained. Sharon stood numbed while her two colleagues tried to get closer, wafting at the pungent smoke. Ellis gave a sharp cry. “Christ! There is someone here!”

“I … I lit him up,” Sharon said, suddenly giggling.

Lewton stole an astounded glance at her.

“There’s two of them!” Ellis blurted. “Bloody hell!”

The fumes had turned foul with the stench of charred meat, but the flames continued to recede and Sharon could distinguish two blackened shapes lying in the glowing wreckage. Lewton swung back to her, face pale. “Shaz … what have you done?”

She shook her head, still giggling. “Not the winos … they were already dead.”

“You say you lit this fire? Why?”

“He was in there. He murdered them.”

“Who?”

“He killed Sergeant Pugh as well.”

“Who killed Sergeant Pugh?”

Lewton’s expression was so earnest, so honestly mortified by what he was seeing here, that Sharon now thought it better to stop sounding so amused and actually try to assist. “Blair McKellan, obviously.”

“Shaz …” Lewton shook his head. “Blair McKellan was arrested forty minutes ago. His boat ran aground near the pier.”

“Mike!” Ellis shouted.

Lewton darted back to his side. Sharon ventured over there as well, vaguely amazed by that last piece of news, though not necessarily mystified. The object of their interest seemed to be a square aperture in the middle of the hut’s scorched floor. A steel grille lay to one side of it. That made sense too, now that she thought about it.

“If there was someone else in here, that’s how he got out,” Ellis said.

Lewton kicked a heap of embers aside and crouched to get a better look. “Shit,” he breathed. “There’re hundreds of channels and culverts down there.”

“And they all lead to the sea,” Sharon said. “But that’s just about right.” The two men gazed at her blankly, at which point she began giggling again, her giggles soon transmuting to full-blown laughter. “He’s so, so angry.”

“Who’s angry?” Lewton asked. “Who the hell are you talking about?”

She made a big effort to control herself. “Who do you think? … Bubbles.”