Watching You(11)

Blue and white tape had been stretched across the gate. Bracing himself, hand on metal, he swung over. It was surprisingly painless.

The porch was barely visible. Berger was there again, behind the backs of the advancing rapid response team, Deer’s odd, whimpering breath behind him. The house was gradually conjured up out of the nocturnal curtain of water. He reached the bottom of the porch steps and wove through the web of police tape. While he was picking the lock, the moon suddenly broke through an invisible crack in the dark sky, sweeping the dirty white porch with icy blue-white.

The sudden light made Berger jerk sideways, but when he opened the door, crouching down to one side of it, he was struck by one thing, and one thing alone. Sorrow.

Sorrow at what must have taken place in there for almost three weeks. Which must have felt like three years to a terrified fifteen-year-old girl who had never harmed a fly. And who had then been taken to an unknown location in order to further develop her acquaintance with hell.

Sorrow followed the beam of Berger’s torch, past the disarmed knife-throwing mechanism in the hall, grew stronger in the living room, became even more tangible in the bedroom, and, as he approached the thicket of blue and white tape over the hole in the floor between the fridge and the stove, carved its way into his brain.

He removed the tape and could just make out the steps when he shone the light into the hole. He lowered himself down and crept through the labyrinth. The beam of the torch played across the walls.

He crouched down by the roughly hacked entrance to the cell. The hole was larger now; he assumed that was thanks to Robin, who was without question the best forensics officer, but also the fattest. He couldn’t help a fleeting, misplaced smile as he slipped, much more nimbly than before, through the opening. Dust from the past powdered him as he snaked his way in.

He had the same feeling as before. But this time Deer wasn’t there to hold him.

Once again he got the feeling that the walls were screaming at what they had been forced to witness. He shook his head hard until all that was left was the sorrow that had already invaded it.

Eventually he managed to hold the circle of light more or less steady. He moved it across the bloodstain on the far wall. He moved closer to inspect the wall on either side of the stain, then glanced at the two decaying wooden pillars a couple of metres from the wall.

Ellen Savinger had sat here, as if in a cage with invisible walls. She had sat still. Wetting the same patch, on several occasions. He left the wall and went over to the posts. They framed the invisible cage, and together with the wall formed a block no bigger than two cubic metres. He ran his fingers along the grooves. They were at three different heights, the top ones at eye level, almost invisible. Then he went back to the bloodstained wall, took a chisel from his rucksack and held it against a well lit patch of wall.

Because this looked the same as the entrance they had smashed their way through. There were definitely lighter patches in the cement, weren’t there?

After all, that was why he had come out here, in the middle of the night, the hour of the wolf.

Berger reached for the hammer. Then he set to work.

A couple of centimetres into the wall he was on the point of giving up. Practically every other blow resulted in a recoil as brutal as if he’d been hammering away at solid rock. But then something appeared. A piece of metal, a hook, embedded deeper in the wall. Overcoming the resistance of his shoulders, he went on hammering.

It took him almost half an hour to reveal the outline. It was a thick metal loop; was it called a mooring ring? And it was screwed into a deeper part of the wall.

Berger put the hammer and chisel down, grabbed hold of the ring and pulled as hard as he could. For one bizarre moment he had both feet up on the wall, pushing with all his might. The ring didn’t shift.

He picked up the hammer and beat all round it. More concrete came loose. It was clear that the composition of the wall changed ten centimetres in, where the ring was screwed in. Was this yet another false wall?

He rolled his shoulders a few times and craned his neck until it creaked. Then he set to work again.

He had no idea how much time passed, but slowly, slowly, dripping with sweat, he managed to cut around the rings, one after the other until there were six of them, three on either side of the stain formed by layer upon layer of blood.

Berger stopped. His muscles ached as if they had suddenly realised the exertion they had been through. He returned to the two pillars and ran his fingers over the grooves in the rotting wood once again. They were at the same height as the mooring rings.

He couldn’t make any sense of it. Had the Scum added another ten centimetres to the entire wall just to cover up the rings that were fixed into it? Hard physical graft, while fifteen-year-old Ellen Savinger sat shackled there? However, she had bled onto the wall, day after day, like the rings in a tree. If some sort of chain had been attached to the mooring rings then the whole wall would have had to have been almost ten centimetres further back at the start of her captivity. So how could the blood have seeped into a wall, day after day, if that wall hadn’t actually been constructed yet?

Berger’s brain was perhaps not at its sharpest – lack of sleep and the brutal physical exertion had each taken their toll – but this looked like a genuine paradox. One of Escher’s impossible images, steps curling round for all eternity, a hand drawing the hand that was drawing it.

But perhaps not. The cement had been a different colour where the rings were fixed. Perhaps the Scum had merely drilled deep to fasten his terrible mooring rings. Perhaps he knew there was a more solid wall back there.