Senator Stanhope’s Home
November 29, 5.20 p.m.
It took a whole day before the Feds and NYPD had finished with the senator’s house. Special Agent Baines and Tom Harper kept it going for as long as they could, but pressure from above forced them to withdraw. Continuing the search for Sebastian was pointless.
Harper and Baines were the last to leave. The Feds’ four black cars were parked in the gravel yard between the main house and its small annexe. Baines took one more look around the empty grounds and then pulled the front door shut.
The team of twelve agents and Harper walked across to the black sedans. There was no talking between them as they walked. They got into the cars and quietly closed the doors. Last was Baines. He shut the door with a heavy clunk and the Federal cars drove off towards the gates in a trailing cloud of fine dust.
Baines was reflecting on the fact that they had been chasing shadows, being made to look fools. He hadn’t experienced this before. It was a new feeling. It was called failure and it didn’t feel good at all.
Back in the drive by the house, the dust settled on the faint tracks left in the gravel. In the late-afternoon sun, the motes of dust took several minutes to disperse and settle, long enough for the sound of the high-powered diesel engines to have disappeared into the distance.
The house had been left alone again, left to return to normal. All was still, very still. The birds had not yet returned, there was no wind and nothing was moving.
Then, after another hour had passed, a line of small stones moved ever so slightly under one of the tyre tracks. The surface of a dust ridge started to collapse as the top layer of stones fell away. Then a larger movement in the stillness: a large rectangular area of gravel moved and shook. The straight sides of what looked like a trapdoor became visible underneath.
It shook as if it were being banged from below. Then a small crease of darkness appeared at the corner and a large wedge of shade opened up. The trapdoor suddenly creaked wide open and hit the ground.
Sebastian emerged into the evening gloom, his eyes squinting in pain. The stink from the cesspool burst into the fresh air, but Sebastian was free.
The small brick-built cesspool was just over six metres from the annexe and fed by a single six-inch pipe. It was nothing more than a semi-permeable pit where the sewage and waste from the guest house slowly degraded before gradually seeping into the surrounding soil. Senator Stanhope hadn’t wanted to pay for connections to the main sewers for a house his in-laws would use for a couple of weeks a year. So he built a cesspool. All night and day it had been Sebastian’s hideout. He pulled Rose’s ear out of his pocket and ran it between his thumb and forefinger. His sculpture could be completed.
His main issue had been how to breathe, but he fixed a tube to run from the cesspool up the side of the inlet pipe and out through the soil. It was a tube the size of his thumb. If any one of the black sedans had landed on it, Sebastian would have suffocated in shit.
That would’ve been what he deserved, no doubt. The irony pleased Sebastian. He liked irony. That such quality agents didn’t even investigate the sewage system of the scene of a gruesome murder also amused him.
He had out-thought them all. His feet, however, were a concern. A day in putrid water had left them a real mess. He couldn’t walk very well, and that would require some explaining at home. But then again, maybe he wouldn’t have to go home if he went to the one person who never asked awkward questions.