The Anglesey Murders Box Set

by Conrad Jones

  The arrests forced the police to reopen the investigation into the death of Malcolm Baines. A detailed search of his computer revealed that he had never joined any Internet gambling sites. His bank account, credit card and login details were all uploaded from Jason Clement’s personal computer. Three months after his arrest for possessing child porn, he was rearrested on suspicion of the murder of Malcolm Baines and held on remand at HMP Brixton. On the morning of his second day of incarceration, his throat was slit by a fellow inmate. Like I said to Ged Knowles, what goes around comes around.

  Cold cases from the eighties and nineties were scrutinised time and again. At last the world was listening to me, and as the clamour from the UK drifted across Europe and the Atlantic, law enforcement agencies worldwide began to look into the groups from a different perspective. Suddenly, their websites began to disappear and their profiles on the social networking sites vanished. Facebook and Twitter removed and blocked anyone connected to their pages. Photographers and reporters swamped the Brunt Boggart Farm near Benllech, and its dark past was investigated in-depth, which added to the intrigue of the entire backstory. The police searched the place in detail. I’d seen it on the news. What the police found, if anything, I’ll never know; the Niners are not stupid. They would have cleansed the farm of any incriminating evidence as soon as Officer Knowles was found dead.

  Detectives were receiving calls from thousands of parents and friends of missing people who they thought may have had links with the cults. It had worked. I had done exactly what Fabienne asked me to do before she died; I had succeeded in slowing them down. They’d been forced into the spotlight and like any creepy crawly, they were scurrying for the shadows. I was elated; I felt like I had won. It helped the guilt that was eating away at me.

  When the newspapers launched their coverage of the story, I drove to Llangollen and bought Evie Jones some lambs’ liver from a butcher’s shop and a bottle of Jack Daniels for me. We had something to celebrate at last. They were under the microscope and I revelled in the discomfort I was causing them. There would be powerful people shitting their pants right now, and that made me laugh aloud. I gave her the liver raw and we spent a few days feeling like there was a light at the end of the dark tunnel we’d been travelling through.

  My mirth was short lived. If they hated me before, now I was number one on the hit list for every would-be Satanist on the planet. Internet trolls began slating my books on Amazon. Dozens of crap reviews appeared overnight. My exposure to the Press had boosted book sales to new heights, but the deluge of one-star reviews brought them crashing back down. They began to use the Internet as effectively as I had. They set up a fake Conrad Jones profile on Facebook and began adding all my friends. Imagine you’re one of my close friends and you know what has gone on from the newspapers. All of a sudden, you get a friend request from me. Then I ask you for help. They were fishing for information from my friends about my whereabouts, and they could tell from the replies who had been in contact recently.

  The newspapers were hounding people that I’d worked with decades ago. I knew because of the ridiculous quotes that were being printed on a daily basis. A couple of ex-girlfriends were pictured in one of the Sunday papers. Of course, they couldn’t believe what a lucky escape they’d had.

  He seemed like such a lovely bloke.

  I always knew there was something wrong with him.

  I told my friends he was odd. All those scary books he writes, I mean, who thinks up things like that?

  Weirdo, total weirdo. My mum hated him.

  Fuck off; I hadn’t seen most of them for twenty years. Looking at how some of them had aged, it was me that had had the lucky escape; as for being a weirdo, she might have a point.

  I monitored the fake Facebook pages and tried to let people know that it wasn’t me. I have no way of knowing who fell for it, but that’s when my best friend Reece and an ex-girlfriend I was still close to disappeared. Ross was never found, but my ex turned up in the River Lune. They were upping the ante in their search for me. I desperately tried to warn everyone on my friends list not to talk to me – it wasn’t me. I messaged everyone and deleted my friends list to protect them. They were attacking my close friends, and when I found out Recce was missing, I cried. They found his dog Alfie slaughtered. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before they went for my family. My mother was seventy-two then and my younger brother lived close to her. If they identified them as my only close family, then they could kill two birds with one stone. I couldn’t see any end to it. It was hard enough running and leaving my life behind me. Protecting myself and Evie was difficult enough. If they targeted my friends and family, then the rules had to change. Hiding from them was no longer an option.

  I decided against all my better instincts that I would call my brother. I used a pay-as-you-go SIM card and drove north to Wrexham in case the police were monitoring his calls too. I was paranoid about giving my position away. When I got through to him, after an avalanche of questions about where I was and what was going on, we both broke down in tears. My family had been devastated by the whole dreadful episode. Apart from the Internet postings and the endless stories in the Press, they didn’t have a clue whether I was guilty or innocent. I had to put him straight on that. I was guilty. I did kill those people, but I told him it was self-defence. My brother knows that I have a fiery temper, but he accepted my version of events without question.

  He told me that the police had been pressing my partner and my family to appear on television to appeal to me to turn myself in. I asked him to make sure that the first thing he did when he got off the telephone was to make sure that everyone we knew stayed out of the news and off the television screens. I spelled it out to him: they were all targets. He told me that the vast majority of people were backing me and that the feedback they were getting from the police and the Press was positive on the whole. He asked me if there was any way that they could help, but I couldn’t think of anything. I said that I would be in touch as soon as it was safe to do so, and we said a teary goodbye. It was good to talk to him, and for a few minutes I felt normal again.

  On the way back to the caravan, I stopped at a small cafe to get some coffee and let Evie have a walk. It was on the shores of the Conwy and the clouds had moved enough to allow a view of the peak of Snowdonia. The sun was trying hard to warm the earth while the clouds were away. I paid for my coffee and picked up a newspaper before making my way to an empty picnic table outside. It wasn’t really warm enough to sit outside, but I couldn’t relax while people were around. Every second glance made me nervous. Had they recognised me as the monster that was running from the police?

  When I picked up the newspaper, my heart sank. On the front page was a full-length photograph of a woman called Pamela Bonner. I recognised her eyes immediately. She had the type of eyes that made men go weak at the knees. We were serious for a few years and we talked about marriage, but our careers took us in different directions. I put my career first and sometimes, I wonder if we would have made it. A few years later, she married, and I was gutted. I wasn’t thinking straight and started seeing a married woman. Some of you will judge me and that’s fine, but we didn’t mean to fall in love, it just happened. The rights and wrongs of the affair don’t matter now, but if she’d left her husband and asked me to commit to her, I probably would have. She had eyes like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Pamela was stunning when we were young; she didn’t look bad in the newspaper either. The headline read,

  wanted writer is the father of my daughter.

  I laughed aloud, drawing curious glances from an elderly couple who were determined enough to sit outside too. I wondered how much the newspaper had paid Pamela for that load of lies. I hadn’t clapped eyes on her for years, so how could I be the father of her child? She must have fallen on hard times to come up with that one, but she had no idea what she’d done. She’d ruined any chances of my partner coming back to me.

  Yes, Conrad, I forgive you for setting
fire to our home, murdering three people and having an affair, no problem. Oh, and by the way, when is your daughter’s birthday? I’ll put it on the calendar, so we don’t forget.

  I laughed as I read the in-depth article, but the more I read, the less comical it became. Most of it was true. In fact, all of it was true apart from the daughter bit. The front page gave a brief timeline of the affair and Pamela was quoted as saying,

  ‘He must have had some kind of mental breakdown.’

  How the hell would she know anything about my mental health? Inside was a two-page spread detailing our relationship, accompanied by a dozen photographs of us as a couple on various days out. Two of them clearly showed her wedding ring. They must have been photoshopped. A quarter of the page showed a pretty six-year-old girl. She was the image of Pamela. Her name was Constance, allegedly named after her father, Conrad. Bullshit. Pamela told the newspaper that she’d never told me that she was pregnant because she didn’t want to split up with her partner at the time. She said, she knew that the relationship could never work because I was obsessed with my career.

  My mind was spinning. At first, I thought that she was trying to make a few quid by selling her story, but the more I looked at Constance, the more I started to believe her. When we split up, Pamela left the company about six months later and I heard that she stepped down from senior management and took on a part-time job somewhere. That fit in with her being pregnant and leaving work to become a single mother. If Constance was six years old, then Pamela would have been pregnant immediately after we split up. Or she was already pregnant, and she was telling the truth.

  The more I ran the dates through my mind, the more convinced I was. Constance could indeed be my daughter. The article made me do backflips in my mind. Was I her father? I could have been. The rest of the afternoon went by in a whirl. Although I was on the run, the news that I may be a father was earth-shattering. For some reason, it put me on a high and the next minute, I would be as low as a man could go. I took the chance of calling my brother back, which shocked him slightly, but I needed him to contact Pamela and find out the truth. It was three hours later when I called him back for a progress report.

  My elation turned into bitterness, hatred, and anger. My brother had spoken to Pamela and she convinced him that Constance was my daughter. She said that when she’d first seen my books on the Internet, she couldn’t bring herself to tell me about our daughter in case I thought that she was a gold-digger. That was hard enough to digest, but when he told me that Constance had been missing since the previous day, I knew that they’d taken her. Something snapped inside me.

  CHAPTER 22

  Snapped

  I’d had enough. I thought long and hard about it, but the same conclusions sprang to mind. They were trying to get to me by tracing my friends and family. My ex was dead, and Reece was missing. Pamela Bonner had told the world that I had a six-year-old daughter and now Constance was missing. Whether she was my daughter or not was irrelevant; they thought that she was. Who would be next? My estranged partner, my mother or my brother could all be on their lists. I was debating how long I would serve for manslaughter. If they sentenced me to ten years, I would serve seven. But in reality, I was looking at spending most of the remainder of my life in jail, if I was lucky enough to face a lower charge. The alternative was that the Niners would eventually find me and torture me to death. When you look at it that way, my options were not great. If the law caught up me, Evie would be destroyed. If the Niners caught up with us, they would destroy Evie Jones, too, but in a less humane way. Whatever we chose to do, we were stuffed.

  In my mind, something snapped. I wasn’t prepared to sit back while they hurt the people that I cared about. I didn’t know how I felt about Constance, but I did know that I had to do something to stop them hurting her. They were killing other people to get to me and there was only one way to stop them. I had to go to them. Don’t get me wrong, I did not decide to give up or give in. I was not going to surrender myself to them or the police. I decided to go and find them. They were only humans after all.

  Ged Knowles and his friend died easily enough. Knowles told me where his nexion was based. The newspapers hadn’t published any blinding revelations about the search there, so I had to assume that nothing concrete had been found. It had been weeks since it was searched. If there was anything incriminating on the farm, it would have been all over the Press. They’d cleaned the place of any evidence; I was sure of it. Even if they had cleansed the farm, there would be some connection there which may lead me to their hierarchy. I intended to start at the top and work my way down until they got the message that my family and friends were out of bounds. I would cut the head from the serpent and hope that it didn’t grow back.

  The police weren’t able to prove that there was a nexion at the farm, but I didn’t need proof. I didn’t have to work within the same constraints they did. Knowles was in agony when he told me where they met; I believed him. The police must have looked into the owners, but they couldn’t arrest anyone without proof that a crime had been committed there. I didn’t need proof to tell me that they were guilty, and I didn’t need the courts to convict them. The Remington was a far better punishment than prison. I made the choice to take the fight to them, and if that meant that I had to die, then it would be my way, not theirs. Evie Jones would want it that way, too, and I knew she would fight them with me without batting an eyelid.

  I was cool, calm, and collected as I doctored my shotgun licence with a false name and a new photograph. ‘Danny Holley’ made a trip to a sporting outlet and bought enough shotgun cartridges to start a war. With my ammunition bought, I cleaned both shotguns and sharpened my neck knife. I cut the photograph of Constance from the newspaper and folded it into my wallet. Then I needed to find out as much information as I could about the farm called Brunt Boggart.

  CHAPTER 23

  Brunt Boggart

  My search was a quick one as the farm was easy to find. Brunt Boggart is old language for ‘Burnt Witch’, an apt name for the place. Google that too if you don’t believe me. The farm that comes up is in a small village on the outskirts of Liverpool called Tarbock Green, and the history behind its name is as dark as the hearts of the people who gathered there. Google it if you’re still doubting me. The farm on Anglesey has no Internet footprint anymore. They’ve found a way to remove it but mystery and myths shroud the history of the farm. Obviously, a witch met a sticky end there, and ever since then, bizarre things have happened. Open-minded folk will see it as a curse from the tortured witch, but the sceptics among us will say that place has merely suffered from a series of unfortunate events.

  The old farmhouse stood for decades, but it became dilapidated and subsidence, caused by the deep shafts from the copper mines on that side of the island, affected the foundations, making it unsafe. Old Mrs Williams, the matriarch of the family, refused to move out of the building despite the structural damage. As senility crept up on her, she became frightened of an old woman who followed her around the house. Of course, nobody else could see her. She died there when a fire sped through the dwelling. In the early seventies, the Williams family built a new farmhouse on the same site and it, too, burnt down. During a ten-year period, they built another three houses on the site and all three burnt to the ground within months of completion. The family suffered from a history of tragic deaths and mysterious accidents before they sold the farm and moved away. Where else would you choose to worship Satan and his dark forces?

  As I read about the history of farm, I felt numb. Some of the newspapers had made a lot out of its sinister past while others brushed over it, feeling that their readers would think the story was being dressed up by reporters. My opinion is that historians have documented the tragic events on that piece of land for years and the Order of Nine Angels wanted to tap into the evil forces entwined in its history. If you believe in spirits and such things, then it’s not difficult to comprehend my theory. O9A believe the evil that h
aunts the site can be tapped. The tragic accidents and deaths which occurred left an energy there, which can be used by them. I do believe that’s what they think to a degree, but I find it difficult to believe something which cannot be explained.

  I’m not sure how it works, but my theory is that everything has the capacity to absorb energy. Energy makes the universe exist, right? Take crystals for instance, they absorb energy. Quartz is used for all sorts of things. What about vinyl records and DVDs; they can store hours of music and film and then we replay them on devices. Well, I think the elements around us absorb events that happen near them. Wood, bricks, tiles, and concrete absorb heat and radiation; they’re forms of energy, so why can’t they store information?

  A ghost, for instance, is a replay of something that happened centuries ago. Mediums and spiritualists are just better at replaying the information than we are. Anyway, I think Brunt Boggart absorbed the evil of the witch and the elements there replay it for those who have the ability to channel it.

  What does that mean to me? Absolutely nothing. I was past caring about the Nine Angels and what they believed in. I didn’t care whether they had supernatural powers or not. I know they can’t stop a bullet. They bleed, they burn, and they die the same as we do. They would never stop looking for me and I was tired of hiding. It was time to take my destiny in my own hands. I loaded up the truck with the shotguns and shells and realised that I might need a little more firepower. I also thought seriously about leaving Evie Jones in the caravan, safe and sound, but I did not think that I would return from this journey. She stresses when she’s alone and I couldn’t predict when, or if, I would get back to her. The thought of her trapped in the caravan, running out of food and water stopped me from leaving her. I decided we would travel together. We would fight together and probably die together. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have next to me when the time comes.