The Catch

by T. M. Logan

  A man who had played her like a maestro.

  A man followed at every turn by disappearance and death: his mother and father, his sister. His great aunt. His foster mother. His first wife.

  His first wife.

  A chill spread over Abbie’s skin.

  He has been married before.

  And his ex-wife disappeared off the face of the earth.

  She thought of the pictures on the bookcase at the home they shared. Ryan as a boy with his mum and dad. Ryan as a young man with two older women he’d told her were family friends. Ryan with a woman he’d told her was his cousin, but who Abbie now suspected was his first wife, Lori Fowler.

  They were all on the mantelpiece of their house in Beeston. They were all in Ryan’s past.

  They were all dead or had disappeared.

  With another cold jolt of horror, she remembered the newest picture on that shelf.

  One of the ‘missing’ posters of her father, propped up in front of the framed photographs.

  It felt as if the car seat had been kicked from under her and she was staggering, stumbling, trying to stay upright. Google searches on her dad’s computer. The bottle of vodka found in his car, the blister packs of pills. A vague memory scratching at the edges of her mind. That day when Ryan had given her a key to his house in Beeston, a single key with a silver cat keyring. The following week Ryan had taken a lieu day off work, and he’d volunteered to pick up more of her boxed-up stuff from her parents’ house and ferry it to their new place in Beeston.

  She had loaned him her old house key so he could let himself in. He’d had it with him most of the day.

  Plenty of time to get a copy of the key cut for himself.

  And if he had, he could have come and gone as he pleased in her parents’ house. For weeks.

  Her head was spinning. All those people, dead or missing. Could it be a coincidence?

  And not just those six. George Fitzgerald too.

  And her dad.

  Her lovely, funny dad, who had carried her on his shoulders when she was small and taught her how to swim. Her dad, who would never go to sleep until she was safely home from a night out. Her dad, who had taught her to stand up for herself, taught her to believe in herself, and cheered her every step of the way.

  Her dad had been weird about Ryan right from the start.

  Her dad had figured Ryan out.

  Her dad—

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ Ryan asked.

  PART IV

  THE CATCH

  69

  Ryan

  His wife jumped in her seat as if he’d jabbed her with a sharp stick.

  ‘What?’ she said, a strange frown etched deep in her face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just wondering what you were reading, on your phone,’ Ryan said, gesturing with a thumb. ‘Looks either really good or really bad, whatever it is.’

  She hit the mobile’s power button and laid it face-down in her lap, gripping it tightly.

  ‘Oh, God, it’s just . . . you know. School stuff.’ She waved her other hand. ‘Ofsted.’

  Ryan pulled the Audi into a long turn as the road curved around, a black and white sign at the roadside welcoming them to the village of Edale. They passed the crossroads and he took a left into the main village car park, pulling up in virtually the same spot his car had occupied four days ago.

  ‘Thought you only had an inspection last year?’ he said.

  ‘Couple of years ago,’ she said quickly. ‘Looks like they’re back. Next week.’

  ‘That is a rough deal,’ he said. ‘Ofsted are basically a huge pain in the backside, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Pretty much.’

  Ryan killed the engine and got out, popping the boot and retrieving his hiking boots from their carrier. He switched them for his trainers and then grabbed his rucksack, heavy with gear. Abbie stayed in her seat. Ryan could see, over the raised back shelf, that she was staring intently at her phone again. He propped the rucksack against the tailgate and returned to the driver’s side door.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  Abbie glanced up at him for just a second, her eyes wide, pupils dilated, as if seeing him for the very first time. Then looked away, fumbling with her seatbelt.

  Ryan knew them when he saw them: classic signs of psychological shock. Confusion, disorientation, inability to think clearly and decisively. Like a passenger on a sinking ship, unable to move, unable to take positive action, because they can’t grasp the reality of what’s happening. Waiting to be told what to do, waiting for someone in a uniform to rescue them, paralysed with shock until it is too late.

  Scientists called it acute stress disorder: the brain basically went into a freeze mode where it became detached, numb, with reduced awareness of its immediate surroundings. The common denominator in people who tend to surrender to death like lambs when things go badly, catastrophically wrong.

  ‘Not feeling too good, actually.’ Abbie blew out a breath. ‘Maybe a little bit carsick.’

  It’s true, Ryan thought. She does look ill. And there was something else there too, something deeper, something he’d seen up close many times before.

  Fear.

  And it didn’t matter how many times he saw it, smelt it, tasted it, there was still that little dark kick of excitement. That little jolt of pleasure, just like he’d had that first time with his sister, all those years ago. Seeing her desperate face at the window in the moments before the smoke and flames took her.

  He gave Abbie a sympathetic smile. ‘Staring at your phone in a moving vehicle will do that every time,’ he said. ‘Fresh air is what you need.’

  She undid her seatbelt and got out. ‘Just going to nip to the ladies.’

  ‘Do you want anything? I’ve got water, paracetamol, snacks?’

  She shook her head, hurrying off to the squat toilet block on the far side of the car park, next to the village hall.

  To her retreating back, he called, ‘I’ll put up some more posters.’

  She gave a thumbs up but didn’t turn around.

  Ryan had brought along the packet of clear plastic wallets, so the posters wouldn’t get soaked with the rain. He knew there was a small risk that someone might recognise him as they went around the village putting up posters, but he could deal with that, talk his way out of it if he needed to. And what was life without risk? He’d already pinned one of the posters to the back of his rucksack. Now he attached one to the little village noticeboard and taped another to the side of the pay and display machine. It was weird to see Ed’s face looking back at him again, smiling in the picture as if all was right with the world.

  There were another two dozen posters in his backpack, but first he needed to check something. He went to stand by the entrance to the ladies’ toilet, leaning against the wall to wait for Abbie. Dug his phone out and ran through his checklist.

  Texts: nothing of note.

  Email: nothing of note.

  Google alerts set up to flag mentions of Ed Collier and George Fitzgerald in the news: nothing new there either.

  He switched to edward.collier711@hotmail.com and saw the red-flagged email from the investigator straight away. Clicked on it and began to scroll, knowing immediately what it was. He felt the heat of anger rising, starting to burn.

  Damn.

  Calm. Be calm.

  He should have foreseen this: Joel Farmer wanted his money. It was no good fobbing him off, burning his report and cloning Ed’s Hotmail account so he could see when the invoice arrived and delete the electronic copy too. He realised – too late – that he should have settled the bill in Ed’s stead, got the investigator to go away permanently. Stupid. Farmer wouldn’t care what happened to the report, it was the client’s information. But he would want to get paid for his trouble.

  Ryan felt fairly confident that Joel Farmer wouldn’t be reporting his findings to the police any time soon, conside
ring much of the information he’d included had clearly been sourced by illegal means. But he would have bet his end-of-year bonus that Abbie had seen the report too. Why else would she have suddenly started behaving like this?

  It was better to be sure. He logged out of the cloned account and into Ed’s real email account.

  Sure enough, the email from Midland Investigations there was pale grey, rather than bold.

  It had arrived an hour ago and had already been opened.

  Shit.

  To give the girl her due, Abbie was actually quite a good liar – mostly where her parents were concerned – but it was all relative. She had a modest talent for lying but Ryan had written the book on it – he told lies so well he often believed them himself, completely and absolutely, from the moment they left his mouth. That was the secret to it. There was no complicated formula, no intense method acting needed. You just had to believe, because if you really believed then your body didn’t generate any of the usual tics and hints that gave bad liars away.

  Ryan knew he was procrastinating.

  This was just a good old-fashioned coin flip.

  Cut his losses? He didn’t need to do this. He’d always known when to go for it and when to hold back. It could still be salvaged.

  You can walk away.

  No, I can’t.

  She’s seen the investigator’s report.

  She knows.

  But it was all ancient history. Nothing current. Nothing that was likely to be reopened without significant new evidence coming to light.

  And things would work out. They always did.

  But.

  But.

  She would continue to make noise about her dear old dad. She would beg the police to shift their attention.

  Ryan made his decision.

  He scanned the car park with a closer eye this time, counting a dozen cars. It was an overcast weekday, outside half-term holidays, so walkers up on top would be few and far between. He leaned a little nearer the entrance to the toilet, one of those echoey sixties concrete blocks with open gaps below the roofline instead of windows. He could hear a low voice, murmuring from inside. Abbie. She’d been in there five minutes now and no one had gone in or out during that time.

  She emerged a moment later and walked back towards the car.

  ‘Hey,’ he said from behind her.

  She flinched in surprise, jerking around to face him as one hand went to her chest. She still looked shaky as hell. Her eyes had that thousand-yard stare that you saw on the news sometimes, in shell-shocked survivors being led away from a bomb blast or a plane crash.

  ‘Hey,’ she breathed.

  ‘Feeling a bit better?’ he said.

  ‘Not sure, really.’ She held up her hands. They were shaking. ‘Have you got any hand sanitiser in your rucksack? The taps weren’t working in there.’

  He retrieved the little bottle from the side pocket of his rucksack and handed it to her.

  ‘Who were you talking to in there?’

  She squirted some of the clear gel out into her palm, still shaking.

  ‘Just checking in with Mum.’

  ‘She OK?’

  ‘Hmm.’ She was trying hard not to meet his eye. And when she finally did, she looked at him as if he was a stranger. ‘Left her a message.’

  ‘Hardly any phone signal up here, is there?’

  She nodded grimly. ‘Ryan, I don’t feel well at all,’ she said, one hand on her stomach. ‘I still feel carsick. I don’t know if I’m up to walking all the way up there. How far is it?’

  ‘Only about a mile and a bit up onto the high moors, I think. We might as well, now we’ve come all this way.’ He smiled, taking her firmly by the hand and half-pulling her towards the single-track road that rose towards the edge of the valley. ‘Come on.’

  70

  Ryan

  Ryan had always loved the moors.

  Forests were for amateurs, in his opinion. Everyone thought they were the natural choice because of all the cover, but that was because they had never actually done any of his kind of work.

  There were three main problems with forests.

  One: the roots. Tree roots everywhere. Big ones, small ones, roots as thick as your thigh and tough as cured leather. It wasn’t until you tried to dig a hole of a decent depth that you realised how fiendishly hard it was when you had to put down your spade every five minutes to hack your way through layers of root matter. He’d learned that one the hard way.

  Two: yes, there was cover in a forest and it gave you an element of privacy, but it also meant if someone wandered along while you were working they could be almost on top of you before you even knew they were there. Then you had a whole new problem. Nope. He’d take open ground every day of the week – open ground with a little dip, or a little rise, open ground well off the marked footpaths, where you could see people coming from half a mile away. Where you could see them a long time before they saw you.

  Three: no trees meant that when it rained, all the moisture ended up in the soil – rather than half of it getting sucked up by trees – which meant the soil was generally wetter, softer, and more malleable. So it was easier to dig and required less effort to go to the required depth.

  As a young boy newly arrived in England, Ryan had become obsessed with Saddleworth Moor, the wild stretch of countryside to the east of Manchester made notorious by the Moors Murderers in the 1960s. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady had buried five young victims there, one of whom had never been found. Keith Bennett’s mother had gone to her grave not knowing her twelve-year-old son’s final resting place.

  Saddleworth was ten miles to the north, in a different part of the Peak District nearer to Manchester. But around here, around Blackden Moor in the heart of the Dark Peak, this was his area. His stomping ground. He knew it better than he knew anywhere else, its contours and slopes, its gullies and cliffs. Its wooded ravines and heather upland, the dark hues of the peat moors and exposed gritstone that gave the desolate landscape its name.

  He knew its secrets. And the Dark Peak knew his.

  It was the one place he’d found where he could be himself, his true self, where he could think clearly. Where all the mess and complication and groupthink of ‘normal’ life went away.

  Where he could be free.

  And it wasn’t a complete lie, about visiting his mother’s grave on the second Sunday of the month. OK, she was his foster mother, but it was close. And she wasn’t buried in Southern Cemetery in Manchester.

  She was buried here, under three feet of peaty earth.

  Almost under Ed’s feet, the moment when he had taken his last breath.

  After what she’d put him through, after all the indignities he’d suffered in her foster ‘care’ – he still sneered at the term – he would have preferred to leave her out in the open, for wild animals to rip and tear and gnaw on until her bones were scattered to the four winds. Until she had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.

  But even at the age of eighteen, he’d known that wasn’t a practical long-term solution. Maybe you could do that out in Alaska, or in the jungles of southeast Asia or the plains of Africa, but not here. The predators here – the non-human kind – were not big or plentiful enough to do a proper job with remains. And while the Dark Peak had a lot of wide open spaces and was not overrun with walkers, it was still a reasonably popular place where you had to take the necessary care if you didn’t want to get caught. Getting caught meant he’d have to stop.

  Ryan never wanted to stop.

  And he was still young, still learning, getting better all the time at what he had come to understand as the ‘Three Ds’ of his vocation.

  First, and most obvious: deception. Right from his very first time, back in that crappy little house in Maple Creek, he’d understood that deception was central to the whole lifestyle. Even as a newly-orphaned eleven-year-old, he recognised the importance of lying well. And not just lying with words, but with actions too. Which was why stuff lik
e volunteering at the hospice was great because it served a dual purpose: it made you look good and you got to see people hours or sometimes even minutes from death. Sometimes he’d lay bets with himself about which of the patients would die first, and in what order. A couple of times he’d been there almost up to their last moment, shooed out as family members arrived to shed their final tears and grab skeletal hands before they turned cold, but he could tell they were in their last moments. He knew – from the rattling click in the throat, the shuddering of the chest, the slackening of the lips – that they were about to cross over.

  Watching patients go wasn’t a patch on engineering his own final moments, where he was fully in control, but it kept him going during the slack periods in between. Kept him steady, level, in those times when his need rose like a tide threatening to burst over the seawall.

  The second of his ‘Three Ds’ was disposal.

  Being good, being really good at this, came down in the end to practicalities. Clear thinking and problem-solving. And Ryan prided himself on being a supremely practical man, a man who could break down any problem into its constituent parts and find a solution for each of these. The doing, that was a given. That was the easy part, the downhill stage of the journey. After all, any moron could extinguish life, but it was the rest of it, the working out, the actual physical A–Z of it, the alibi, the scene – primary and secondary – the tools and the forensic side, that was where you could really shine. And Ryan prided himself on shining brighter than most. Maybe brighter than any. That was why he needed a comprehensive cover story, complete with a beautiful young wife and a couple of apple-cheeked kids.

  Which brought him to ‘D’ number three: disguise.

  And that was where Abbie came in.

  Because single men over the age of thirty drew suspicion. Single men were suspect. A girlfriend helped, but if a girlfriend why not a wife? Not a flaky mistake like Lori, but a nice, pretty, respectable wife from a good family. A married man drew less attention, that golden ring on the fourth finger of your left hand magically making you more trustworthy, more familiar, more safe. And if a wife, why not kids too? A couple of kids to round out the picture, the perfect disguise for a man like him. Because how often did you hear about guys – the kind of guys who had done what he had – being married with kids when they got arrested?