I paused and lowered the gun a fraction. “Explain.”
“They run a lot of these places. You might think Hallow Hall was just a one-off, a single abomination made possible because of Father Vargas and his influence in the community... but it didn’t even start in Italy. It started in Bulgaria, and Sergei imported it. There are a lot of Hallow Halls in small forgotten places, all over. Italy, France, Croatia, Spain. It’s been going on for twenty years in some cases,” Blackwood said.
I took a deep breath, and my chest rattled. I felt the presence of my heart at that moment, an organ I had long believed dead. Now it hurt. It hurt at the thought of other Hallow Halls and other pregnant women disappearing.
A tight band of tension wrapped around my throat and pressed in.
“Where else?” I ground out. “In the South?”
Blackwood nodded quickly. He was excited that I’d taken an interest in his information, hastily tossed out to buy himself time.
“Yes, I’ve been collecting some of the patients’ records and drug therapies?—”
“Why did you stay there so long?” I interrupted, getting to my feet and standing over him. “You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to do no harm,” I reminded him.
Blackwood glanced left and right, looking for a way to escape the simple question, and then shrugged. “Harm was going to come to those women whether I helped or not.”
The pain inside my chest intensified. It was an excuse I was familiar with. The way I justified my own profession. I had more in common with Blackwood than I liked to think, and that was fucking depressing.
“Besides, the drugs I was developing there, with free rein, they’d change victims’ lives,” Blackwood continued.
“In what way?”
“The power to forget the things you didn’t want to remember, to erase it. To be turned on by a pill slipped into a drink; instead of fighting it, she’d want it. The victim would become powerful?—”
The shot was sudden, a flash in the darkness.
He slumped back against the bloody carpet, against the fragments of his sick and twisted brain.
I straightened up. I was breathing heavily, I noticed in a detached sort of way.
I was angry. I felt sick. I needed to know more. A swirling sense of foreboding had filled my head, and it wouldn’t go away.
I left the bedroom with its stink of gore and copper and walked through the apartment until I found Blackwood’s office. It was stuffed to the brim with boxes. His small desk in one corner had a box open beside it, as well as a laptop. He seemed to have been going through the boxes and categorizing the information. Searching for insight from old patient records. I stared at the boxes. They were the large, A4 size that you get in offices. There had to be fifty of them that I could see, and even more behind them.
I flicked the light on. I’d killed Blackwood with a silencer on. No one would be calling the police. I had time. I holstered my gun and reached for the first box, pulling it down from the top of the stack and opening it.
I had to know.
Dawn shonethrough the blinds of Blackwood’s office when I reached the last few boxes. My eyes stung, and I felt numb. Numb to the horror of seeing name after name of patients the Stoyanov family had used and abused in institutes just like Hallow Hall. Some were experimented on; those were the older patients, the ones whose relatives were paying for their care. They ran unregulated clinical trials of illegal substances and sold the information—including the formula for making the drug—to the highest bidder. Then, there were the teenage girls. The ones who’d been pregnant when they’d arrived and gave birth to babies who were promptly sold on the black market. If the mother could recover and be confused enough not to understand what had happened, she stayed at the institute until someone could knock her upagain, and the cycle repeated until she died or was killed, and then her organs were harvested.
I’d seen some awful things in my life. Bombs dropped on civilian hospitals, whole families dead at their kitchen tables, bodies riddled with bullets. I’d seen evil in its purest form, and I’d been naive enough to think that nothing could shock me anymore.
I’d been wrong.
My head felt black as pitch as I turned to close a box and accidentally knocked one of the last ones off the desk. The contents spilled out across the floor. I felt infected by darkness from reading the records. Tainted in my soul... and I was a man who had known from a young age that I was hell-bound. Shakespeare had been right.
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
I could practically feel the presence of Old Nick watching me as I read.
I had to get out of here.
I bent down and scooped the files back into the box. My fingers were clumsy, still clad in the thin latex gloves I used when carrying out a hit.
The papers in this box were older than the others, some even handwritten.
If I let the police have them, would they do something about it? Would they investigate, or would it be hushed up? I had little faith in the justice system. And families like the Stoyanovs would have connections. There was no way they’d managed to operate for so long without greasing the right palms. No, I couldn’t trust the police with this. No way.