The Doll's House - [28]

Finally the van slowed to a stop. Helen glided past and parked up out of sight round the street corner. She was out of the car in seconds and rounded the top of the street just in time to see Price step inside a house not fifty yards away.

Helen, flanked now by DC McAndrew, hurried towards it. She could see DC Lucas and Lloyd Fortune approaching from the other direction and signalled them to hold back. She would take the lead on this one.

Gesturing to McAndrew to follow, she slipped round the side of the house, keeping below the line of the windows. The back door banged quietly in the wind. Helen hesitated, listening. Voices. She could definitely hear voices. Price’s was raised in anger, but who was the other person? Who was he talking to?

Teasing the door open, Helen slipped inside. Edging across the room to the open doorway, she could hear the voices more clearly now. Price and a young girl, who was crying and remonstrating. She seemed to have done something wrong, though Helen couldn’t tell what, as the voices had now gone quiet.

A nasty bang made Helen jump – the crying that followed making it clear that Price had struck the girl. Helen didn’t hesitate. Pushing the door open and raising her baton, she stepped inside.

It was time to bring this game of Hide and Seek to an end.

47

Ruby screamed for all she was worth. She shrieked, whooped, ranted and raved – anything to break the awful silence that filled the small room. Her captor had only been gone a few hours but it felt like an eternity. What was he doing? How long would he punish her for? How long would she be left alone down here?

She bitterly regretted her outburst now. She had no power here, no bargaining chip, so why had she pushed him away? As she’d lain alone in the half-darkness after his departure, the minutes crawling by, the worst kind of thoughts had seized her. Thoughts of herself slowly withering to dust in this dreadful place. So she screamed to distract herself, to keep herself company in her lonely cell.

Tiring of this, she now found herself stalking the room again. It was more in hope than expectation – she had already explored her confines several times – but she had to do something. Passive resignation would only lead to madness or worse. She had to think. To act. To find a way out.

Clambering on to the table, she ran her fingers over the ceiling. The floorboards were wooden and could perhaps be prised apart… But, for all her probing, they refused to budge. They had been sealed with solid silicone mastic that stubbornly resisted her attempts to remove it. It was presumably some kind of DIY soundproofing. Ruby shivered at the thought. Why did he need soundproofing down here?

Jumping down, she completed another circuit of the walls, but giving up quickly, turned her attention instead to the other items in the room. She pulled the pictures off the wall and yanked fruitlessly at the metal coat hooks. She pulled the pointless cooker and fake basin away from the wall, then, in a final fit of pique, grabbed the clock that hung above the bed and tossed it across the room. It was a flimsy children’s clock, designed to help kids learn to tell the time and it stared down at her day after day, mocking her with its idle hands, which remained resolutely locked at a quarter past twelve. It landed with a clatter on the far side of the room.

Ruby breathed out heavily. All that was left now was another assault on the door. It was solidly built with a heavy lock. There was no way she could pull it off its hinges or ram it with her shoulder. They only way to open it was to force the lock with some kind of implement. But what could she use? She would need something heavy and solid, which she could smash down on it…

Bricks. She was surrounded by bricks. The mortar had been touched up in places, but the brickwork was probably a hundred years old or more, so… Ruby ran her hands over the cold surface of the walls, forensically searching for signs of weakness in the mortar. Round and round she went, her nails scraping at the mortar, but every brick held firm. Had her captor thought of everything? Had he left nothing to chance?

Ruby was tired now and about to give up, when she spotted one place she hadn’t tried. Pulling the bed away from the wall, she dropped to her knees to examine the brickwork that lay behind.

As she leaned down to take a closer look at the mortar, she felt a trickle of cool air brush over her face. She kept her eyes closed, revelling in it for a moment. It felt as if someone was stroking her face, like an act of kindness. It felt like a lifetime since she’d received one of those.

The air was coming through the brickwork. She dropped down on to her front and crawled closer to the wall. Sure enough, the brick was loose. Her damaged fingers protested but she jammed them into the crumbling mortar round the edges and tugged for all she was worth. To her surprise the brick came out easily.

The cavity behind it was stuffed full of paper. Confused, Ruby pulled the papers out, but was disappointed to find the cavity was shallow, hardly more than the depth of the brick itself. She pulled at the bricks next to the opening, but they refused to respond and three broken nails later, she gave up.