by Robert Innes
“Blake?” Stephanie asked. “What on Earth is the matter with you? What are you just standing there for?”
Blake ignored her. He just continued staring at Samuel, his mind still whirring on how best to broach what he had to say.
Samuel looked up at him, his expression slowly faltering until he was staring back at Blake with a look of nothing other than resigned acceptance. He knew exactly what Blake was thinking.
“Mum, Dad,” Blake said quietly. “Could you give me and Samuel a bit of privacy?”
“Privacy?” Colin asked. “What the ‘ell is up with you, lad?”
“Blake, it’s nearly one in the morning,” Stephanie told him. “What on Earth could be so important at this time of night?”
“If it’s that late, then go to bed,” Blake said sharply.
“Blake, I know that interview you did earlier was a bit unfortunate, but there is no need to take it out on –”
“Actually, Stephanie,” Samuel said, standing up. “I think the lad might be right. You two get off to bed. I think it’s probably time for me and Blake to have a little chat. It should have happened a long time ago.”
Thirteen
Blake closed the door to the living room, listening to Stephanie and Colin sniping at each other as they meandered their way to the bedroom. When he finally heard their bedroom door close, he wandered around the sofa, Samuel watching him all the while.
“So,” Samuel said quietly, “how much do you know?”
“Enough,” Blake said, sitting down opposite him. “For a start, I know that you’ve probably got quite the night of police interrogation ahead of you. Even if we ignore what happened twenty-five years ago, I think being the father of Thomas Frost is enough to be getting on with.”
Samuel nodded. “One thing that has stuck with me all these years is the look of horror on that little boy’s face that I spoke to that night. You still had it when you were standing in that room when I shone the torch at you today. I knew who I was looking at the second I saw your face.”
“Is it any wonder?” Blake asked. “Twenty-five years I’ve had those memories. Think about that, Samuel. A quarter of a century spent having nightmares and flashbacks. And all that time, you knew who had done it.”
Samuel sighed heavily, then pulled an old, leather wallet from his pocket. He opened it up and pulled out a small, battered looking photograph and put it on the coffee table in front of Blake. It was of the same child that Blake had seen photographed in Samuel’s living room. He picked it up and stared at the black-haired child gazing calmly back at him.
“Ah yes,” Blake murmered. “The child you claimed had died. This is Thomas Frost?”
Samuel nodded. “Yeah. That photograph and the one you saw in my house earlier are the only ones I’ve got of Thomas that were taken before I started to realise what a little monster he was, and when I say monster, I don’t mean it in an affectionate way. I don’t think you can really have affection for somebody that murders your own mother, no matter who they are. I kept hold of them to remind myself now and again of a time when I was proud to have a kid just like most people are, before I had to try and pretend he never existed.”
Blake looked up at him. “Your mother? Julia Watkins was your mother?”
Again, Samuel nodded, taking the photograph back from Blake and staring at it himself. “I don’t expect you to understand what it’s like to have a child that you realise is a psychopath. Looking back, all the classic signs were there, even when he was a toddler. I remember once walking into his bedroom and finding his pet hamster on the floor. I’ll spare you the details but it wasn’t pretty. He told me the cat had done it. Said that it had got out of the cage and the cat had got to it before he could be stopped. I believed him, of course. Who wants to think their kid is capable of something like that? But he was so calm about it. Any other child finding their pet like that would be distraught, but he was just lying on his bed, reading his book, without a care in the world, with this dead hamster on the floor. He got in fights at school, he lied all the time, didn’t seem to care about any punishments we gave him.”
“All classic signs of child psychopathy,” Blake murmered.
“We just thought he was a normal boy. Kidded ourselves, more like. But fights, lies, what little boy doesn’t do that? It’s what growing up is all about. Then my Shelia died. Cancer. Then he just got worse. Then it all just went to hell. To be honest, there were times that I was glad she’d died. Seeing her son turn into what he did, it probably would have killed her anyway.”
“So how old was he when he killed Julia?”
“Eighteen,” Samuel said his expression darkening. “I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. When Thomas was a child, they were really close. Mum would always defend him, against anything he did. Used to drive Shelia mad, the amount of rows we’d have about it.” He chuckled to himself, his eyes showing a man allowing himself a trip down memory lane, to happier times. Then he snapped himself out of it and looked at Blake again. “I’ve since figured that closeness had nothing to do with it. He just saw someone who he could manipulate. I wonder sometimes if that’s where he got this attitude towards women, because he certainly didn’t get it from me. My mum was old fashioned, happy to play the stay at home wife while my dad went off to work. She used to get quite preachy about it. Never agreed with all that women’s lib stuff. Women should stay at home and be women, she used to say. Can’t say I agreed with her about it, but it maybe had an affect on his mind.
“Any road, once he was a teenager, Mum saw sense. She was kind but she wasn’t stupid. She said once he got past the age of about thirteen, he knew the difference between right and wrong. By the time he got to eighteen, she near enough hated him. By then it was just me and him. He didn’t have any friends as such, he just sort of coasted through life doing his own thing.”
“How long have you lived down this street?” Blake asked.
“Not long before Mum died,” Samuel told him. “I mean, we’d always lived in Manchester, but, well, Thomas’ behaviour meant that we’d have been better off living on a narrow boat. It’d have been easier to move whenever we needed to. The neighbours in our old street hated us. Don’t go thinking that your parents must have known something, they really didn’t. As far as I know, they never even met Thomas.”
“So, go on. What happened that night?”
Samuel sighed again.
“Take your time.”
“I’d gone to a work night out. We were celebrating taking down this gang of drug dealers we’d been after for a while and we wanted a night on the town to celebrate our hard work. I’d pretty much led the investigation, I was getting all the right noises from the inspectors. Work wise my life was pretty good. The only thing I was worried about was leaving Thomas on his own in the house. He didn’t have a job, but he’d been telling me about this computer system thing he wanted and I’d told him no chance, so he’d started taking things from the house to sell.”
“How intuitive,” Blake remarked.
“Mum said she’d pop in unannounced to keep an eye on him. Anyway, I got home from the night out. It was late. I walked in and I just sort of knew something was wrong. He looked rattled, and that was something he never did. Normally, anything in life he’d just take in his stride and deal with coldly, but this time he looked just that little bit on edge. I asked him what was wrong and he just went upstairs without saying anything. Then, soon afterwards, I heard police sirens and the next thing I know this street is full of blue flashing lights. Doesn’t matter who you are, flashing blue lights, especially at that time of night, is never a good thing. They were there because a ten-year-old boy had just found a body in the old house down the street.”
Blake felt his stomach flip. “So, what happened?”
“I went out into the street, saw some of the boys, they told me what had happened, so I went into the house. There she was. My mother. Sitting in a rocking chair with a knife sticking out of her back.”
He paused for a few moments and shuddered. Blake suddenly felt like he had no right harping on his own memories of the event when Samuel had had to go through a similar experience, but to a far worse extent. “To this day, I have no idea what made me take the path I did with it. Well, that’s not true. I do. In my darkest moments of self-reflection, I know exactly what it was.”
Blake shook his head in disbelief. “Your job.”
Samuel looked at him in surprise.
“I know,” Blake continued. “Something about this gig, isn’t there? Somehow makes everything else sort of fade into insignificance, even the stuff that should really matter. Once you get yourself knee high in a difficult case, it’s like you just forget the rest of the world exists. I’m not exactly innocent of doing that myself.”
“Don’t you dare compare yourself to me, Blake,” Samuel said with a smile. “You think just because your mother walks around with her nose in the air that she doesn’t constantly gush about you at whatever opportunity she gets? I’ve heard about your career. You’re far more deserving of any plaudit I’ve ever received.”
“So, how did you know that it was your son that had killed Julia?”
“It wasn’t too hard to work out,” Samuel replied. “I’d be fixing up a fence in our backyard at the time. If you remember, the only way in and out of there at the time was through that small window you managed to crawl through.”
“Because the rest of the back was boarded up,” Blake said. “I remember.”
“I imagine if you saw all of that today, doing the job you do now, with your brain you’d work it out in a heartbeat,” Samuel replied. “Those planks of wood that had been put up over any door or larger window, they were new timber. I spotted it straight away when I arrived that night. Nobody had been in or out of that house for years, so why would anybody border it up now? I recognised the wood. Even the nails were the same brand. I went home, checked the garden, half of my timber was missing.”
Blake nodded. “So what happened? He killed her at home?”
“I told Thomas that I knew it was him and do you know what he did? Completely the opposite of what I expected from him. He burst into tears. He sat on the sofa and sobbed. He told me that his grandmother had attacked him because she’d seen him swiping some money from my savings jar that I thought I’d hidden away.”
“He claimed that a woman in her, what, 70s, had attacked him?”
Samuel nodded. “The thing was that it was believable. Mum had a temper. This scar I showed you, it’s not from a suspect.”
“Your mum did that?” Blake clarified as Samuel lifted up his fringe to show off the scar above his eyebrow again.
“She threw a large, glass fruit bowl at me when I was sixteen. She’d come home early from work and I’d had a few mates ‘round and the house was a wreck. I didn’t do that again, let me tell you. She nearly blinded me. Like I said, her and Thomas had come to blows on more than one occasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had attacked him.”
“He was claiming self defence when you had just found your mother with a knife sticking out of her back? How was that believable?”
Samuel shrugged. “He manipulated me as well, I guess. It’s what he’s good at. Even now, I don’t want to believe that my son is a murderer and I’ve seen every news report ever made about him. You think I want to mentally add my own mother to his list of victims? Anyway, long story short, she was apparently going mad at him, hitting him, kicking him and he just picked up the first thing he could lay his hands on.”
“And that just happened to be a knife?”
“Then he dragged her through the back gardens. Rather looked like she was some squatter by the time you found her, didn’t she? That’s what getting pulled through four different gardens full of hedges and mud can do to a person.”
“So, because you were in charge of the investigation, you were able to just lead the rest of your officers down a path to nowhere,” Blake concluded. “Julia Watkins becomes just one of life’s many victims that nobody owns or cares for. All to protect your son and to put your head in the sand as to what you should have done. No wonder you didn’t feel you could do the job anymore after that.”
“Would you?” Samuel murmered. “Could you go out on the streets every day to look after the public knowing that you were protecting a killer? All because I wanted to keep the only side of my life that I felt proud of going. Turns out I couldn’t even have that. If I’d done the right thing and faced up to the fact that I have a psychopath for a child, all those women would still be alive. My own son is a vicious, cold-blooded killer. There’s nothing that can survive that.”
“What about your other son?” Blake asked him.
Samuel frowned. “What?”
“Your other son, the one that now lives in Harmschapel. The one that Thomas Frost has been manipulating and moulding into his own creation.”
Samuel stared at him in confusion. “What are you…?” Then, his face dropped as the realisation of what Blake was saying. “Jacqueline’s kid? You mean…?”
“Yeah,” Blake replied. “Tom’s yours. He’s not your grandson. He’s your son. Jacqueline worked it out from the start.”
“Women know these things I guess,” Samuel said, looking shell-shocked. “My God. You know about our night together then? I wasn’t proud of that. She was a lovely girl, Jacqueline, well, I expect she still is.”
“She’s currently in custody under suspicion of attacking Tom,” Blake replied. “All because of what his half-brother has been up to. They’ve been plotting together to get back at me for getting Frost imprisoned, I believe. You have to tell me now, Samuel. Do you have any idea where he is?”
Samuel shook his head. “None. I promise you that, Blake. I stopped defending him a long time ago. I just wish it had been earlier.”
Blake sighed as he pulled out his mobile to call the station. “So do I, Samuel. So do I.”
Blake stood in the doorway to his house as he watched Samuel being led to the police car waiting outside. All he could think was how yet another life had been destroyed because of Thomas Frost. He glanced around the street and rested his head on the doorframe. He was out there somewhere but Blake could not help but feel that they were running out of time before Frost claimed yet another victim to get his attention.
“Blake,” his mother said, appearing by his side with her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her. “What on Earth is going on? Why are the police arresting Samuel? What’s happened?”
Blake sighed as they watched the police car drive off into the night. “It’s a long story, Mum. One that took about twenty-five years to reach its end.”
“Twenty-five years? What are you talking about?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Blake murmered, closing the front door. “Time for bed I think.”
Stephanie glanced out the window as the police car finally disappeared around the corner, but seemingly accepted that Blake was in no mood to recount the story to her at the moment. “Do you need me to make you a hot drink? I know you’ve been having trouble sleeping again.”
“I think I’m alright, Mum,” Blake told her, with a small smile. “I’ve had questions answered tonight. Who knows? It might mean I get the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time.”
Fourteen
The next morning, Blake arrived at the police station early, with a birthday card and Sally’s cumbersome lamp underneath his arm. Fortunately, he had been able to escape the house before either of his parents had gotten up and quizzed him about Samuel’s arrest, but as Blake walked through the corridors to the meeting room, he realised that he felt incredibly fresh and well rested. Having the answers to questions he had been asking all his life had resulted in him waking up the next morning with no memory whatsoever what he had dreamed about and he had never been more thankful for it. Perhaps, he thought, as he placed the lamp on Sally’s desk, he could finally move on from the demons from his childhood.
He was just settling
in front of the desk he had had assigned to him when he arrived, when his mobile rang in his pocket.
Blake assumed it would be Sally to ask him to cover for her with Gresham for her lateness, but was surprised when Harrison’s name appeared on the screen to ask for a facetime call.
Seeing no sign of either Gresham or Fox around the office, Blake flicked his thumb across his phone and was delighted to see Harrison wandering through Harmschapel on his way to work. Since the revelations of the previous night, Harrison had been the only thought he had had to distract him from anything else.
“Morning,” Harrison said when he answered. “I thought you might be up and about this early.”
“Hard not to be at the moment,” Blake replied. “It’s good to see your face.”
“And you,” Harrison replied. “So, go on. Tell me what you can. Did any of that information I gave you last night help?”
“Yeah, you could say that,” Blake replied. “Frost’s father is currently in custody.”
“You had him arrested?” Harrison asked. “That was quick.”
“Perverting the course of justice is a crime. So is causing something that has prevented me from sleeping for so long, but we’ll probably leave that off the charge list.”
“How are you?” Harrison asked, sitting down on the bench Blake recognised as the one they had both been on the morning they found Tom. “How does it feel? It must be weird having answers after so long.”
“It really does,” Blake said with a smile. “I’d probably be able to appreciate it more if Frost wasn’t still out there somewhere. I can’t believe I finally know who that woman was, as well as how she was killed. I had the best night’s sleep in ages last night though. I’ll certainly have some things to tell to my therapist when I next see her.”
“What about Frost? Are you any closer to finding him?”
Blake sighed. “No. Not really. Not that I can discuss any of that with you, Mr Detective in Training.”