The only sound in the room, other than her muffled screams, was that of the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. The clock was warning him. Time was running out.
He sat at the table, not looking at her, not looking at the clock. He was looking at the guidebooks spread out like a fan before him, one open in his hands. The sun was setting and it was irritating him. Soon, he’d need to either switch on the light to continue reading or leave the house. He wasn’t prepared to do either, not until he knew for sure where Martha was. The answer was in front of him, if he could only put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right way.
Outside the autumn wind was picking up. A storm was due in a couple of days. He saw it as another omen that time was running out. He hoped the bad weather wouldn’t hit before he was ready. After he was done, it wouldn’t matter what the skies did. It wouldn’t matter about anything at all once he was finished. As long as he could see the sky when he needed to. But that was further ahead. Not time to think about that yet. First he had to find Martha.
The computer sat ignored in the corner of the room. He hadn’t needed to use it. He’d got everything he needed from her mobile phone. Modern technology was his friend. A password or PIN and he’d have had to force it out of her. She might even have lied long enough for the phone to lock up completely. But with fingerprint recognition, all he had to do was press the phone to her hand and it was unlocked in an instant. All she could do in response was scream louder into her gag while he sat and read through her emails.
Technology had led him to her house and it would lead him to Martha. He hadn’t used the phone for long. He wasn’t sure about mobile tracing but he guessed it worked similar to landlines. Stay on too long and you could be traced. He had no intention of being caught that easily. He had spent a lifetime being careful, making sure he didn’t stand out, didn’t draw attention. That concept even washed over into his choice of clothes. A plain pair of blue jeans, a tee-shirt under a woollen jumper that was once white, now greying, small hole at the left elbow. Over that was a charity shop raincoat in black, the uniform of the nondescript. He wouldn’t stand out anywhere, his greying hair cut short, his beard long enough to allow him to remove it and become a different person should the need arise. His car was just enough years old to blend into the street, not draw any attention.
“She’s at a castle,” he said, folding the brochure closed before sliding his hand towards the next guidebook. “But which one?”
The pile of brochures and guidebooks was all he had to go on. She still wasn’t talking.
Tantallon castle. Warwick. Alnwick. Dover. He’d try the big names first, the tourist draws. But he needed something to help him narrow it down. He didn’t have enough time for a leisurely search. The night was approaching. He’d remained hidden for so long, it was hard to accept he might have left it too late to emerge from hiding.
It had been a hard balancing act. Move too soon and he risked alerting her that he was coming, that he wasn’t dead like she thought. Move too late and he would miss the deadline.
He could still do it as long as she played ball. He looked down at her. He had kept an eye on social media whilst he was hidden. He knew it would be key to finding her. She never appeared but her best friend had. It was all the help he needed.
The email had given him the next clue. Sitting there on the phone, one more helping hand just when he needed it most. This was his destiny, he could feel it coursing through him like pure adrenaline, keeping him wired, keeping him alert.
I’ve finally done it. You were right. It took a long time but I think I’m settled at last. You remember which castle I was going to, don’t you? Come and see me some time.
He turned back to the brochures he’d gathered from her bookcase. He had looked into how many castles there were in Britain after reading in the email, wanting to know how big a task it was going to be, using her Internet to find out. There were more than six hundred castles in the United Kingdom. Two hundred and fifty in England alone. Was Martha even in England? Would she have gone further than that? What if she’d travelled into Europe?
He needed to know quickly, which is why he had the brochures in front of him. She wouldn’t have chosen one at random. She’d have chosen one that meant something to her.
He had wracked his brain before he began his hunt for her, thinking all the way back to when he last saw her, well worn paths in his mind that he had walked along many hundreds of times. Nothing came to him for a long period but finally, out of nowhere, he realised what he needed to do.
She had vanished, not showing up online anywhere. As if she didn’t exist anymore. But she was still out there somewhere, he knew she was. He needed to think laterally, not easy with the excitement of the chase already building inside him. It was time to emerge, like a butterfly from a cocoon. He was ready to fly up to them. It was time to finish the game.
Type Martha Coleman into Facebook, Twitter, Google, nothing useful comes back out. There were Martha Colemans out there but none of them were her. All of them were dead ends.
But she wasn’t in control of what her friends did. There was less than a week to go when it happened, the key to finding her appeared before him. He’d been utterly demoralised, his calendar showing him the time he’d wasted, each passing day making the hunt more urgent.
With six days left, he dug out the photo, the one photo he had of Martha, the one he kept hidden under the loose floorboard in the bathroom. Peel back the lino, lever up the board, reach all the way in until his elbow was covered in dust and there, taped to the underside, almost out of reach, was his sole link to when the game had begun.
It was a yellowing photo, the image containing five smiling faces and him. He was with them, the last existing piece of evidence that he had ever been with them, the building behind them long gone.
Five of them and him, five girls, four of them smiling. She was on the far left, not looking at the camera. She was not smiling, her eyes were fixed on his. Just looking at the photo was hard. It brought on the shame of arousal combined with the knowledge of his failure. But there was also the spark of warmth, the way he had felt whenever she’d looked at him. She never knew how hungry he had been for her, how much she outshone her companions. She found out of course after the photo was taken. He educated her in so many things. And was she even grateful? Not once had she thanked him for what he’d done for her. The bitch.
He felt that way every time he looked at the photo. Churning emotions running through his head. It was hard to do but a necessary evil. It gave him strength. It helped him to keep going, to remember why he was doing this. He was doing this because he wasn’t going to lose again. He could handle the pain of looking at her as she was then, he had handled far worse. He only had to glance at the wrinkled and gnarled flesh on his arms and hands to be reminded of that fact.
The photo was a talisman as much as a memento. He had kept it despite the risk. He had to. It had kept him safe. It would help him to find her one day, he somehow knew that even back then. A hero’s journey couldn’t be easy or else it wasn’t worth the effort. It had to be hard. And he was right. It had been hard and the photo had helped. He had looked at the photo with less than a week to go and he had tapped the face of the girl next to Martha.
Lisa Kirke. Her best friend. The only other one still alive. Why hadn’t he thought of her? Typing that name into Facebook brought up a whole new list of faces to go through and halfway through the third page, he’d seen her. Even with ten years of aging, Lisa was still recognisable.
She was in Chester. Everything on her profile was visible. He tried to contain his excitement as he scrolled down through her past, seeing more than a year of updates, photos, memes, likes, a life on screen, a life that missed out the most important thing about her, the fact that she’d met the Gamesman and lived. Then he found what he needed on the next page of images.
OMG New house!
An album of photos and best of all there was a view from the front. Not only was the number on the door visible, in the corner of the shot was the street sign. Acorn Lane. It was all he needed.
If he had more time, he might have played with her when he found her. But the clock was ticking. He looked up Acorn Lane, then used Google Street View to narrow down the search. By the time he went to bed that night, he knew exactly where she was. He hardly slept. He was too excited.
The next day he drove just over two hundred miles until he reached Acorn Lane, Chester. He parked up at the end of the street and walked up to Lisa’s door. He pressed the bell and waited, parcel in his gloved hands, the gloves hiding the damage to his skin, his jacket hiding the rest.
A car drove past as he waited. The driver didn’t even look in his direction. It had been a long time since the Gamesman had been in the news and he’d kept a low profile since then. The world had moved on. It had forgotten him. It would remember him again soon enough. When he saved them all, he’d be lauded as a hero, not vilified as a murderer. It was the injustice of their opprobrium that angered him the most. His job was to save the world. Could he help it if he wanted to have some fun along the way? Relieve the stress, use her to lift a little of the burden from his shoulders.
The door opened and he curled his toes in his boots, the way he always did whenever he needed to keep his emotions in check. Lisa was standing there and it wasn’t easy to keep the excitement from his face. He was one step closer to Martha. She was the key. He just had to get her to talk.
Lisa was blonde now, she’d swelled out, her chest in that tight white top drawing his eyes. Playing with her would be so much fun, seeing how her body had changed since last time he’d had her alone. Her missing eye made him harden, he had done that to her. A permanent mark. A reminder of his power over her, something she’d never have chance to forget. She might not have burned like she was supposed to but he’d marked her nonetheless. The report of her injuries had reached him in hiding. One eye lost in the blaze. Whatever she looked at, he’d be there in her mind, taking the place where her depth perception should be. For a second he could hardly breathe.
“Yes?” she said, not a hint of fear in her voice. No sign that she recognised him. His cap was pulled low over his eyes, just to be safe.
“Delivery for a Miss Kirke.” His voice disguised, higher than usual, a slight lisp and a hint of a West Country accent, enough to put her off.
“That’s me.”
“I’ll bring it in for you, it’s heavy.”
“That’s fine, you don’t have to.”
But politeness won out. She wasn’t pushy enough to tell him to stop when he walked past her and along the hallway. He glanced in each room as he went, not lingering long enough to make her suspicious, just making sure she was alone. Then he stopped in the dining room, putting the parcel down on the table, turning to find Lisa standing in the doorway. Could she see how hard he was? “Do you need me to sign something?” she asked as he reached into his pocket.
“No,” he replied, taking a step towards her as he pulled out the knife. “I need you to tell me where Martha is.”
An hour later, he had her safely tied up while he looked through her emails, finding the one he wanted after ten minutes of searching. She watched him from the corner of the room.
So, Martha was at a castle. He was too excited to think about checking the sent folder. If he had, he might have seen the pages of messages, each one identical, each one sent to the same recipient. It simply didn’t cross his mind to look. He had an email from Martha, proof that she was still alive. All his focus was on that. It was almost too much to bear.
He found the brochures and the guidebooks on the bookcase in the living room. She was still refusing to talk. He was patient, giving her time. She would talk in the end, especially when she saw what he’d brought in the parcel, the means to remove her other eye.
His mother had been very clear with him. He could make them do anything if he worked hard enough.
You’re special, Samuel. You’ve been chosen to do this, you should feel honoured. I know it might seem scary, such a weight on such young shoulders.
Treat it like a game, Sam. Here, let me show you.
He’d tried to do what he was chosen to do. He’d made it a game. But he’d failed last time. He’d let Mother down. He wouldn’t fail again. He opened the parcel.
“Where is she?” he asked, turning to look at Lisa. She flinched, screaming into her gag and trying once again to free herself, her head smacking into the wall next to her, no longer able to see where she was.
“Tell me and I’ll let you live.”