Watching You(97)

Sam tries to turn his head, which is pulsating with pain. He feels something warm trickle down through the cold sweat on his forehead. He realises that it’s blood.

As if that makes any difference.

He turns his head as far as it will go. He can detect movement behind him, by the floor, can see the outline of some contraption. When he looks up and starts to tilt his head back, he can see chains reaching from mooring rings in the wall. And his eyes come to rest on his own outstretched arm. His wrist is held tightly by a leather strap, and the leather strap is attached to a heavy chain that leads off into the darkness. Somewhere towards the end of it he can make out a large cog wheel.

He can hear moaning, and it takes far too long before he realises that he’s the source of the moaning.

He pulls at his arm, but the chain is holding him firmly in place.

When he turns his head back, a face is there, right in front of him. It looks at him calmly, with clear blue eyes. And the unfamiliar face speaks with a very familiar voice from childhood: ‘You knew we had to end up here eventually, Sam.’

He feels his own breathing, every breath a victory over himself. It would have been so much easier just to stop.

The face pulls back slightly and is sucked back into the darkness from which it came. Sam can see the body, the bulletproof vest, the wrench in his hand.

‘Good timing,’ William’s voice goes on from the unknown face. ‘There are only a couple of bolts left to tighten. I presume you’ve got time to wait.’

Then the face vanishes again. New sounds behind his back. A different metallic sound this time. And then the echo of a crank, followed by an emphatic ticking noise.

The face appears again. And in William’s voice it says: ‘I’m sorry I had to use something as banal as a crank, but I had to build the clock as quickly as possible. And because I can see you’re wondering, I’ll tell you: it took half an hour. Not that you’d be able to see that from your watch; the face is covered with condensation. How could you treat your watches so badly?’

The ticking sound is interrupted by a click. Sam feels his arms get pulled away from his sides. For now the pain stands no chance against all the other pain that has invaded his being.

William moves slowly backward. Now he can see further into the darkness in that direction. Sam sees him sit down on one of the carpentry benches. The one with Sam’s Glock on it.

It’s even lighter in the other direction. Where Molly’s lying.

Dead.

William sits and waits for a while. Sam understands what he’s waiting for when he hears the mechanism click once more. But even this time he doesn’t really feel his arms being pulled further apart.

William sees where Sam’s eyes are looking. ‘She’s an adult. Of no interest to me. Wrong vocal pitch.’

William turns Molly’s laptop towards him. He looks at the images from the security cameras. ‘I enjoyed watching to see which of you would win. When I was preparing to leave the house in M?rsta, I stood for a while wondering what height I should set the knives at – Sam or Molly? Molly had the Security Service behind her, and you, to be honest, seemed pretty slow, Sam. What happened to you?’

Somehow Sam gets control of his vocal cords. He hisses: ‘Are they alive?’

William nods regretfully. He goes on nodding for a long while. ‘There’s a lot of death in the third house. But that’s not what we ought to be talking about. We’ve got eight minutes before your first arm gets ripped off. It’s usually the left arm, if you’re right-handed.’

‘Where’s the third house, William?’ Sam says.

‘And we shan’t talk about that either,’ William says. ‘We’re going to talk about your betrayal. You’re going to die standing face to face with your betrayal.’

‘What do you mean, “betrayal”?’ Sam says. ‘I didn’t report you.’

‘You were too cowardly,’ William says, with a slight smile. ‘That would have been better. Then everything would have been dragged into the open. Instead it stayed in the dark and grew.’

‘Your self-awareness is impressive, scum,’ Sam splutters.

‘But now you’re being pretty brave. “Scum.” A goalpost on a grit-covered football pitch. Anton, the Scum, and that nasty little gang of girls. My cock exposed. The girls giggling cretinously. And along comes the only friend I’ve had in the whole of my shitty life, and whips my cock over and over and over again with a damp towel. It’s a wonderful life.’

Sam looks at William. He needs to know. If it’s the last thing he hears.

‘Where’s the third house, William?’

The clock clicks again. Now the pain pushes past all the other pain.

‘Why did you kill your aunt?’ Sam shouts.

For the first time William looks at him with something like surprise.

‘My what?’

‘Your aunt, Alicia Anger. Why did you kill her?’

‘Aunt Alice,’ William says dreamily. ‘She was kind. I didn’t even know she was alive. But I understand.’

‘What do you understand?’

‘How astonishingly slow you all were. I slipped up outside the school in ?stermalm, with the van. I snatched the blonde one in daylight, when there were plenty of witnesses. It was time for you to start hunting me, to make it exciting. But nothing happened. So I let an old woman walking her dog see the van in M?rsta. And nothing happened then either. Not until Molly showed up at Wiborg wanting a device to disrupt recording equipment. The context wasn’t quite clear, but if she wanted to hide something from the Security Service, it was probably something like this.’