Page 67 of Girl, Entangled

A brick wall. Where was this? Outdoors?

No. It wasn’t outdoors.

Next – and she was surprised to discover this – she was not bound in any way. She was merely sitting in a wooden chair, but still had full use of her hands and legs. Or at least, as much use as she could get out of them, which right now wasn’t much.

Historically in serial killers, a lack of restraints on the victim meant a quick death.

She pushed that thought aside and focused again on the brick walls. Upstairs, she’d seen a metal door. She remembered that much. And a man in the living room who was bound.

The two thoughts collided into one. Upstairs was victim number four, and she – presumably victim number five – was down in the basement.

Then the room arrived all at once and she understood why she’d been thinking about metal.

The thing stood eight feet in front of her, on the flagstones, lit by a single bulb in the rafters. It came up taller than a man. Black iron, hinged down the front, the two doors standing open as they had on the cartridge paper upstairs. The inside of each door was set with rows of iron points the length of her finger, blackened at the tips, arranged so that the points of one door would meet the points of the other when the doors closed on what stood between them.

The iron maiden.

Greaves had drawn it. Varro had built it, and now she was seeing it in three dimensions.

Her mouth filled with saliva and she swallowed against it.

She didn’t let herself look at it for long. There was the rest of the room to take in, and the rest of the room made no sense until it did.

Gym equipment. That was the thing that didn’t fit, and it sat right in the middle of everything. A bench and a loaded bar and a rack of plates and dumbbells ran up in a line from small to monstrous. A full-length mirror was bolted to the wall facing the bench, and Ella looked into it and saw herself on the floor, small and slack and bloodied at the neck, and she made herself look away from that too. In her dusty reflection, she also saw a distinct lack of weapon at her hip.

It was what hung beside the mirror that stopped her breathing.

A skeleton, strung up against the concrete on a length of wire, articulated at the joints so it kept the shape of a standing man. It was enormous. The long bones of the legs, the cage of the ribs, the great yoke of the shoulders, all of it built to a scale she had only ever seen in one place, in an intake photograph of a six-foot-eight man with a face too small for the breadth of him.

Thomas Greaves had come home, and his protégé had hung him where he could watch.

‘You should be quieter when you break into people’s houses,’ a voice said.

Several inconsistencies became apparent. While it was a fair point, and one Ripley made all the time, the voice that spoke it didn’t belong to her partner. And besides, she idly remembered that, according to Roy at MCI Jessup, Simon Varro was completely mute.

But perhaps more concerning was that the voice belonged to a woman.

Ella rolled around on the floor, wincing through the pain, and glimpsed the opposite side of the room.

There, casually squatting in the corner of the room, was a slight, familiar-faced blonde woman.

‘Surprise,’ the woman said with a flourish.

Drugs.

Hallucinations.

It couldn’t be anything else.

Under no other circumstances would she have followed the trail on a completely unrelated murder investigation – only to wind up in a basement with Lindsey Doyle.

‘You,’ Ella breathed. ‘You’re Doyle.’

‘Great detective work, Ella.’ Lindsey Doyle brandished Ella’s Glock 19. She sniffed the barrel, then pointed it in Ella’s direction. ‘I don’t want to shoot you, so don’t make me.’

‘What’s… going on?’

Lindsey Doyle cackled so loudly it echoed through the basement. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet. Or have you?’