fiddled with the device until it let out a shriek that made him jump, spent two minutes adjusting it, and ten seconds saying he’d never heard or seen Roger. The excitement over, he promptly clicked it off and disappeared back inside his house.
The two detectives turned their attention to Roger’s back door—still firmly locked.
“We really should get a search warrant,” said Jackson for George’s benefit, though he had already made up his mind not to bother.
“If it’s empty we won’t have a problem,” replied his partner.
George overheard. “There’s nothing in there, I can tell you that for now.”
“How do you know?”
“One of your sergeants came by after you left yesterday and I let him in,” said George, failing to mention that he too had been in the house.
“How?”
“With a key.” Then he added sarcastically, “How do you think I let him in?”
Jackson’s partner ignored the sarcasm. “Oh great, now you tell us—c’mon let us in then.”
George carefully examined the highly polished toecaps of his boots for several seconds. “I let ’im take the key,” he mumbled, feeling guilty for some reason, as if he had been personally responsible for its safe-keeping.
A few minutes later they stood in the front hallway, just inches from the cupboard under the stairs, directly above Trudy’s dungeon. The “accidentally smashed” kitchen window was letting in a welcome breath of fresh air.
“Sewer,” said Jackson with a sniff, as his partner shuffled through the heap of mail squashed into a pile behind the front door.
“This one’s undone,” he lied, as his finger prised open the flap of an envelope that appeared to contain more than junk mail. Slipping out the contents, he recognized the letterhead from a furniture store. “According to this, LeClarc had a new bed delivered here back in May,” he announced. “Phew, look at the price.”
Jackson peered over his shoulder. “Well where is it then?”
George unintentionally gave away his previous incursion. “There’s no bed in here.” But the detectives overlooked his remark, intent on searching for more documentary evidence.
A letter from British Telecom fell open with some assistance. “There should be a phone here somewhere,” said Jackson, skimming the printed page. “Here’s the number. This was May as well—the fourth apparently.”
His partner flipped open his cellphone and tapped in the number. The distant phone rang twice in his ear but no one in the house heard it, then a string of high pitched bleeps alerted him to the fact that he was trying to communicate with a machine.
“It’s a fax or a computer modem,” he said, with a confused look.
The computer screen, just ten feet below, leapt silently into life “STANDBY—MODEM CONNECTING.”
The sudden movement caught Trudy’s eye and, with only a moment’s hesitation, sent her scrabbling across the room, oblivious to the pain in her hands and knees.
Detective Constable Jackson had shut the lid on his phone and cut the connection before Trudy even reached the machine. “CONNECTION—ABORTED,” flashed three times before the screen went blank. Tears streamed down her face. “MUM, MUM, MUM,” she typed frantically, then sat sobbing and coughing, staring at the screen, begging it to try again. “MUM HELP.”
“There should be a phone jack somewhere,” said Jackson’s partner as he probed around the hallway and on into the front room where he discovered the recently installed socket. “It’s here, and there’s no phone plugged in,” he called, as if that somehow explained the modem’s response.
D.C. Jackson, rifling through the mail, needed more light and tentatively toyed with the ancient brass light switch before finally giving it a flick—whipping his hand quickly away as if it might bite. “The powers on,” he pronounced unnecessarily, when they were bathed in the sepia glow of an ancient bare bulb, then he dropped to the floor and swept up a number of long black hairs.
George Mitchell took once glance and brushed them off, saying, “Mrs. Papadropolis,” as if she’d lived there the day before.
“What colour was Roger’s hair?”
“Almost white, sort of straggly and thin.”
“Couldn’t be his then,” he said, dropping them carelessly back on the floor.
Some newly made scratch marks on the hallway walls caught his attention and he traced them. “Probably where they brought in the bed,” he mused. “ There’s not a lot of room.”
Five minutes later they’d searched the entire house, confirmed the bed was not there, and stood in the cramped hallway wondering what to do next. D.C. Jackson expressed his thoughts aloud, seeking ratification from the others. “There’s no phone but the number works; the power’s on; there’s no bed but there should be; there’s no furniture or belongings, yet LeClarc was living here—the Met. Team saw him, so did George.”
“Sort of living here,” corrected his partner.
“Yes. Sort of,” Jackson reiterated. “It’s as if he was living here but he wasn’t. Like he’s in another world, another dimension.”
“You’ve been reading too many weird books,” said George, steadfast in his belief that there was a rational explanation for everything.
“Hello,” shouted Jackson, as loud as he possibly could, startling both his partner and George. “Is there anybody there.”
“Don’t piss about,” hissed the other detective, mindful of the presence of a member of the public.
“I’m not,” he replied, jumping up and down, his size 11 shoes thundering on the bare wooden boards. “C’mon out wherever you are,” he continued, his loud voice filling the entire house. “C’mon—we know you’re here.”
“I shouldn’t do that if I were you,” said George worriedly, recalling the sergeant’s demolition of the old chair.
The raised voices and banging easily penetrated Trudy’s dungeon and, finding a hidden reserve of energy, she rushed the door and tried thumping. Her blistered and bloated hands were like water-filled balloons thwacking a target at a village fête. She screamed, nothing happened. Pulling herself up to the keyhole, pressing her lips hard against the metal plate, she willed her vocal chords into action. A series of squeaky sounds leaked out.
D.C. Jackson, nearest to the cupboard, heard. “Listen,” he said. “What was that?”
“Mouse,” said George, dismissively. “There’s plenty of ’em around here.”
“Or a rat,” suggested his partner, remembering the dead animal outside.
No one thought it was Trudy and the detectives left the house by the front door a few minutes later, deciding that a photograph of the real Roger LeClarc, from his parents, would be useful; George volunteered to clean up the broken glass.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Mitchell, we’ll get someone to mend the window,” said Jackson on his way out. “Not that there’s anything of value in there.”
The voices had stopped for Trudy and she rushed hysterically back to the computer on the other side of the room, some inner strength taking control, her dead nerve endings no longer registering pain. Still panting frantically. her fingers flew across the keyboard.
“MUM I CAN HEAR YOU. I’M DOWN HERE.
MUM PLEASE HURRY.”
Dragging herself back to the door she put her ear to the keyhole and heard nothing. “Please Mum,” she sobbed. “Please Mum.” Then exhaustion took over and she gradually collapsed back to the floor.