The Coop Read online

  The Coop

  E.C. Deacon

  Contents

  Number sixteen

  The coven

  Everton Bowe

  Chinese whispers

  Ties that bind

  Empathy

  Traps

  Help

  Dark secrets

  Lost and found

  Epiphany

  Christmas common

  The coop

  The doves

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

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  Copyright © 2019 E.C. Deacon

  The right of E.C. Deacon to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  For Jules

  The sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves

  of all that they chose.

  Genesis 6.1–4

  Number sixteen

  He was watching her through a pair of gun metal grey reading glasses. He owned a number of different designs, half long distance and half 4:5 readers, for the more intimate work. He bought them at Poundland, because you were required to pay in cash. She described herself on her profile as having chestnut hair, but an unkind person, he mused, would describe her as ginger. But, on closer examination, her pale skin intrigued him. He detected a hint of freckles beneath her foundation and wondered if they blighted the rest of her body.

  She sat in a candlelit alcove of The Botanist. A bar that, considering its prime position outside the gates of Kew Gardens, was curiously always empty. Even in the summer, when the picture-postcard Green was full of cricketers and St. Anne’s Church Hall was doing a roaring trade in home-made cakes and, being Kew, specialist teas, the Botanist and its tapas menu remained for some reason persona non grata.

  Nephilim knew none of this. He’d made his recce on a windswept October night, and was immediately drawn to the bars recalcitrant staff and dimly lit nooks and crannies. In his mind, it was perfect. Perfect for watching and not being watched.

  His mobile warbled a text warning. He ignored it. The ginger had caught his eye, it was time for work. He returned her smile. She was expecting him to make the first move – they were always so predictable – but he didn’t. He knew he didn’t match the photo of the “mature single” she’d agreed to meet, because he’d uploaded a stock image from the Internet and created a fake profile. He waited, enjoying her confusion…

  “Excuse me. Are you Mark? Mark Knowles?”

  For a moment, he actually felt sorry for her. She stood marooned in her faux-fur gilet, hiding behind her handbag like she was trying to protect her long-gone virginity. He pretended not to hear. Took out his cucumber hand gel, cleansed his hands – and his mind of human kindness.

  The ginger flushed, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Excuse me?”

  He turned, full of effusive apologies, and said, “Oh. Sorry. Were you talking to me?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s Tessa? Tessa Hayes? Match.com?” Behind her middle-class veneer of confidence, she was faltering already. “You’re not Mark?”

  He shook his head and affected a look of disappointment. He’d rehearsed it numerous times, usually whilst shaving his head before taking his twice-daily shower. He never bathed; it was bad for his condition and the dirty water risked further infection.

  “Sorry. I was waiting for someone. I thought… Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  He assured her she hadn’t. Which was true. He enjoyed watching her squirm. It amused him. Besides, she’d brought it on herself. Desperation was unflattering in a woman, especially one on the wrong side of middle-age trying too hard to look like she wasn’t.

  He finally put her out of her misery, introducing himself as Robin Holt – a name stolen from The Times obituaries – a surveyor from Oxshott in Surrey. He was hanging on for a call from a potential client in Kew about a meeting, so he could sympathise with how she felt. Perhaps he could buy her a drink and they could wait together? He could see her weighing up her options. She’d been stood up; what had she to lose? He smiled sheepishly, already knowing the outcome.

  Tessa Hayes didn’t. If she had, she would never have accepted his offer. She’d have run screaming out of The Botanist on pretty Kew Green and away from the horror awaiting her.

  Three-point-eight Google miles away, a Tube train grumbled beside platform four in Earls Court station. It had been stranded for twenty minutes and even with the doors open it reeked of sweat and frustration. Finally, the guard explained over the intercom that someone had “found themselves under a train” at West Brompton. A few commuters let out an audible moan. Not for the fate of the suicide but for the delay to their homeward journeys.

  Gina Lewis suspected it must have been a man. Throwing yourself under a moving train seemed to her an unnecessarily macho thing to do and left a lot to chance. What if death wasn’t instant? You’d be left with multiple fractures, amputated limbs… brain damage?

  The pervert still hadn’t answered her text, so she idled away some time by checking the stats on her iPhone. She found a site called Loss of All Hope and tapped it. It made for fascinating reading. She’d had no idea that in the United Kingdom, train incidents accounted for 3.5 per cent of all suicides. Or that there was a ninety per cent mortality rate for jumping in front of a high-speed train and only sixty-seven per cent for an underground train. Or that Wimbledon, her home station, was one of the UK’s suicide hotspots.

  A sudden swell of movement by the carriage doors interrupted her. She looked up and saw them file in two by two and fill their District line ark. She counted twenty of them, all dressed in navy and grey. She wasn’t good with ages, never having had or wanted kids of her own, but guessed the oldest girls couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Corralling the flock were three harassed teachers and in the middle of them were two young boys. Gina watched them from her seat, looking for any sign of embarrassment, but the boys seemed blissfully unaware of the sexual imbalance. She smiled ruefully to herself and wondered how long that innocence would last.

  “Are those your real eyes?” A little blonde girl had stepped in front of Gina, staring quizzically at her. Gina could smell her sweet Orangeade breath as she leaned in for a closer look. “Or lenses?”

  Gina swiftly dropped her eyes back down to her iPhone in an effort to ignore her.

  “They’re pretty. I’ve got amblyopia.” She pulled down her lower lid to reveal her left iris, which was the palest of hazel and twisted down and slightly inward like a misplaced contact lens. It was curiously beautiful and leant her face an unearthly quality, like an angel hiding a dark secret.

  “It’s called Lazy Eye but we’re not allowed to say that,” said a tiny Indian girl with plaits down to her waist.

  “I don’t mind,” said the little blonde girl.

  “So,” said Gina, warming to the girl’s lack of self-pity, “will you have to have an operation?”

  “Yes. Or she’ll go blind,” explained a seriously freckle-faced girl who had joined the clutch now encircling Gina. “We’ve been to a concert for her charity.”

  “Oh. That’s nice. Who was playing?�
�

  “We were,” she announced to anyone who would listen. “We’re a choir.”

  And on cue – albeit unasked for – the little troupe suddenly launched into “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.

  Gina was stunned. Not because it was bad; on the contrary, it was breath-taking. The purity of the children’s voices counterpointed the cynical lyrics of The Rolling Stones’ song perfectly, and utterly transformed the meaning. She sat there, mesmerised, as the other kids joined in and their voices swelled in innocent pleasure until they filled the whole carriage.

  Thirty minutes later, Gina pulled up the hood on her Whistles parka and trotted down the steps of Wimbledon station, still thinking about the magical event she’d unwittingly become part of, and that if she hadn’t looked up it never would have happened. She felt proud of herself, because her fellow commuters, mothers and fathers amongst them, had kept their heads steadfastly buried in their papers until the choir had safely disembarked at East Putney.

  Gina stepped out into the sleeting rain, manoeuvred her way through another weary tide of commuters, parting like the Red Sea around the wheelchair-bound Big Issue seller, and turned left onto Queens Road. She loved the long, arrow-straight walk past the police station on the right and the Everyday Church, offering tea, Zumba and spiritual solace, on the left. A fox loped out of a gateway ahead of her and sat on the pavement, watching her as she approached. She stopped in front of it. It eyed her, king of its patch, then shivered the rain from its fur and ambled past and into the next gate.

  The rain was getting heavier now but she didn’t care. “You can't always get what you want,” she hummed to herself as she crossed to the south side of the road. The neon streetlights threw oval pools onto the path ahead of her like giant’s footprints. She silently counted her own between them, feeling like a femme fatale in a movie making her way to some clandestine meeting, where her fate would finally be decided.

  Which, in a sense, she was.

  Christ, thought Tessa Hayes. What’s wrong with me? She felt queasy, thought she might throw up. How could she be so drunk? She’d only had two small glasses of Merlot. One minute she’d been fine and the next she was slurring her words and could barely form a sentence.

  “Wake up,” Nephilim instructed as he pinched her nipple. “Come along. Open your eyes.”

  She should have been outraged but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. Her shit of an ex-husband had shagged everything with a pulse and blamed her lack of sex drive. Why shouldn’t she have some fun?

  She hauled open her eyes and grinned lopsidedly up at him. But somehow the words wouldn’t come. Something was choking them back. Blinking up at a strip light that hung from the corrugated metal ceiling, she saw pipes running like giant veins and disappearing into some shadowy void beyond. Perched on them, silhouetted against the grey metal, were birds. White birds, with bead-black eyes, staring implacably down at her… and it smelt of… meat? Raw meat. She tried to call out. But there was something in her mouth, something soft pressing down on her tongue. Panic rose like bile in her throat and she gagged.

  Nephilim watched her choke, thinking about the demise of his first model. She’d been his Night Sister. After his operation, he contracted bacterial MRSA. Not from the wound itself but from the endotracheal tube that was inserted into his throat to aid his breathing. Within hours, sepsis had set in and he’d become delirious, lost consciousness, and nearly died. Something positive had come out of it though. His “angel of the night” – an ebullient, fifty-five-year-old night nurse. He’d kept her cadaver for three months to practice on and in retrospect realised that she’d help his work to grow in stature and depth. He was actually thankful for her shortcomings because they’d taught him to become more selective in his choice of future models. They now had to fulfil a number of criteria, not just physically but psychologically and sexually.

  And the ginger lying at his feet appeared to.

  Caxton Road was labelled as being on the “other side of the tracks” by those who care about such things. Gina Lewis didn’t. Situated within walking distance of St. George’s Hospital, which was handy for her appointments, she loved the road immediately. It felt authentic, democratic. Two rows of identical semis reflecting each other across the narrow street, but each somehow individual and populated by real, working people. The antithesis of the village with its designer boutiques, empty but for Wimbledon fortnight.

  Her psychotherapist, Leonard, was less enthusiastic. But then, she reasoned, caution was part of his job description. Grey of hair and temperament, Len, as he preferred to be called, was concerned about her making an impulse buy, especially something as large as a house, so soon after coming off her lithium. But Gina’s mind was made up. She finally knew who she really was. Had met someone who understood and loved her for who she was. She was going to stop picking at the scabs of the past and start making new memories. She sealed her electronic bid and, hey presto, won the auction. She was ecstatic. In all her thirty-eight years, she’d never won a thing. It was an omen. She was finally starting a new life.

  Number sixteen was a freshly painted white semi, with racing green shutters, situated midway down on the left. She unlocked the Chubb and the mortise, switched on the light and made her way into the kitchen, eased off her Office brogues and black tights, and dumped them both in the pedal bin.

  The pervert who’d ruined her life was still ignoring her texts – revenge was going to be so fucking sweet – but Laura Fell had left a message on the answerphone offering to pick her up on her way to the Chill Out. Gina toyed with the idea of ringing her. They’d grown up together – shared flats, holidays, even the occasional boyfriend. But she couldn’t share this. She replaced the phone in its cradle and looked around her perfect lounge, drawing comfort from all her hard work. Her mother hated her calling it the lounge but it was her house and her favourite room. The Victorian fireplace she’d had sandblasted to reveal the original cast iron. Its antique tiles she’d restored herself. The floor-to-ceiling brocade curtains she’d found in the Curtain Exchange, the matching tapestry cushions online. She didn’t care if her mother thought it might be more fashionable to have the whole thing knocked through into one modern living space. It was her home. Hers.

  She strode back into the kitchen, yanked open a drawer, grabbed one of the neatly folded brown paper bags, unfolded it, held it over her mouth and nose, and began to count backwards from twenty as she slowly and methodically inhaled and exhaled.

  Ten minutes later, she sat in her Victorian roll-top bath, shaving her legs with a disposable razor. She used smooth practised strokes, always following the direction of the growth. She had sensitive skin and didn’t need any nicks, especially today. The water made her jet-coloured hair look indecently dark against the pale skin of her shoulders. The rest of her body was hairless. She washed the remains of the shaving gel off, stepped out onto the travertine tiles and wrapped herself in a towel. Then lowered the soft-close seat on the lavatory and sat on it to paint her toe nails.

  She always wore the same colour on her hands and feet: Plum Wine. She loved the name. It made her feel sexy, even a little tarty, and she smiled to herself, remembering the first time she’d worn it. She’d met a guy on a singles holiday to Tenerife and they’d gone on a guided tour to Mount Teide, a dormant volcano. They slipped away from the party to have sex behind an outcrop of boulders. But afterwards when they lay nude sunbathing, she opened her eyes and found her toenails covered in tiny blue butterflies. And when they landed on her ink-black pubic hair she laughed and began posing like a living statue. But the idiot guy had thought she was being disgusting and demanded she brush them off before she caught something.

  Hair and make-up flawless, she walked back into the lounge carrying a loop of blue-nylon clothes line. Putting it to one side, she checked her reflection in the mantle mirror, and smiled to herself as she adjusted the cowl neck of her vermillion dress. She looked good. Bloody good. Finally satisfied, she drew the curta
ins and stood back to admire her perfect lounge for the last time. Above her, the primrose chandelier, a joint moving-in present from her friends but obviously chosen by Laura Fell, hung like a promise of better things to come. Perhaps there were.

  It took her three attempts to lasso the clothes line around the chandelier. The rococo design made it frustratingly difficult to completely encircle, but, she reflected grimly, it was better than a train. She gently tightened the slip knot and tested the weight, picked up her mobile and climbed carefully onto the pine coffee table.

  Now all she had to do was tie the noose.

  Tessa Hayes swam back up through the darkness and forced herself to breach the surface. Willing her throbbing head to lift, she saw to her horror that she was naked and lying on a plastic sheet. And that her hands and feet were bound by ropes to metal rings screwed into the scrubbed plank floor.

  Nephilim heard her groan and turned from his metal workbench with a syringe in his left hand. Then knelt beside her and pulled her panties from her mouth with his right. Tessa gasped for air, but before she could scream, he squirted something into her throat, pinching her nose to make sure it went down. She tried to kick out but she couldn’t; he was sitting astride her, his other hand on her throat, daring her to continue.

  He felt her submit, pushed the gag back into place, eased himself off her and walked back to arrange the scalpels, scissors and forceps, that lay on his workbench.

  “I’ve just given you another sixty milligrams of Rohypnol. I won’t bore you with the details but, put simply, it binds with your brain’s benzodiazepine receptor and shuts down your neurological functions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you, I just need you calm for my work.” His voice had the professional detachment of a surgeon reassuring a fearful patient; benign but authoritative. “My name is Nephilim and my work is my vocation. It’s a gift and I am going to share it with you. I’m going to make you whole again. For Him.”