Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set

by Catherine Moloney

  Markham and Olivia had also attended the cathedral’s Sunday service, sitting inconspicuously in a pew right at the back.

  The hour is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light… then on that last day, when Christ shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to life immortal…

  Advent and Eschatology. The end of days.

  As the gloomily apocalyptic clarion call echoed around the cathedral, Markham glanced at a marble statue to the left of their bench. It depicted a fiery archangel, in full armour and with outstretched wings, thrusting his sword into a huge coiled serpent which writhed beneath his feet.

  Put on the armour of light.

  Looking at the celestial combatants locked in their epic struggle from time immemorial, Markham felt a shiver of apprehension. What if the forces of darkness were too much for him this time? If Noakes was right, then evil had prevailed for decades and its perpetrators had flourished like the bay.

  At that moment, a shaft of sunlight picked out Canon Woodcourt on the altar. As though conscious of the DI’s scrutiny, he looked up. It seemed to Markham that the clergyman looked straight at him before once more bowing his head.

  Clamorous doubts assailed him once again. Wasn’t it possible that he and Noakes had somehow got this whole thing horribly wrong and that Woodcourt was exactly what he seemed – a decent and devout man of God? Could they exclude the possibility that Woodcourt’s connection to the missing teenagers was simply an unfortunate coincidence? Had he and Noakes allowed themselves to be swayed by popular prejudice against priestly ‘kiddy fiddlers’?

  Markham recalled Olivia’s invariable mantra against pessimism. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Well, he would not rush to judgement without proof. Please, God, it would be forthcoming…

  The service seemed never-ending. Normally he would have gained pleasure from the richness and beauty of the liturgy, but today the lighting of the advent wreath – four slim crimson candles round a central gold taper – merely served to remind him of lives brutally snuffed out.

  Looking up at the stark vault of the cathedral, Markham thought back to his moment with Olivia under the stars the previous night and felt a searing sense of dislocation. What did his poor victims signify in the cosmic scheme of things?

  At that moment, Olivia leaned trustingly into him, stray wisps from her ungovernable chignon tickling his chin. Imperceptibly, he felt the tension leave his body, as though magically banished by her touch. Suddenly God did not seem quite so remote. In the silence which followed the prayers of intercession, he sent up his own desperate petition: I believe, Lord, help thou my unbelief!

  At the end of the service, Markham felt a mysterious reluctance to leave the cathedral. Watching the retreating backs of the choristers as they disappeared down the processional ramp to the sacristies, he had the oddest compulsion to call the boys back.

  Olivia sensed his anxiety.

  ‘D’you want to pop round to the school and check things, Gil? I don’t mind, honestly.’ She laughed. ‘I know how it is, sweetheart. That motto Not on my Watch runs all the way through you like a stick of rock!’

  Markham smiled shame-facedly. ‘Am I that obvious?’

  Linking Olivia’s arm in his, he made a snap decision. Best to steer clear of the school today.

  The boys were in safe hands, and Woodcourt had no reason to suppose the police were on to him. Time to enjoy a Sunday stroll and the company of his girlfriend like a normal human being…

  ‘How about the Municipal Cemetery?’ he asked.

  It was a quirk of Markham’s that, with so many victims of crime consigned to unmarked graves at best and sludge, silt and slurry at worst, he derived curious satisfaction from visiting graveyards where the dead lay tidily at rest in serried ranks under their grassy mounds and sombre headstones. Olivia fancied that this was where he communed with all those discarded uncoffined innocents he secretly held in his heart.

  At the cemetery, the couple slowly wandered hand in hand between the graves underneath a sky bleached of colour save for a huge blood-red sun trembling on the horizon.

  Olivia preserved a sympathetic silence. She knew that when Markham was ready he would talk. Meanwhile, she contemplated the poignant doggerel on tombstones and wove little histories around generations that lay deep underground.

  As he walked, Markham’s thoughts were running on Georgina Hamilton. The autopsy had revealed cancer of the womb, but her GP was unaware. Markham suspected she might have been seeing someone privately, in which case it would take time to unravel the thread. His conviction that Georgina would not have committed suicide remained unshaken – no coward soul hers – but DCI Sidney would no doubt be delighted at the prospect of such a verdict. He kicked a stray pebble on the path, relieving his feelings by imagining that it was a sensitive part of the DCI’s anatomy. Never fear, Georgina, I’ll get justice for you and the others. Judgement Day is coming, I promise!

  ‘Ouch!’ yelped Olivia.

  Markham became aware he was squeezing his girlfriend’s hand so fiercely as to cause pain.

  He kissed the little palm and tucked it into his coat pocket. Mollified, Olivia smiled up at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Liv,’ he began.

  ‘No need. I’d rather you took it out on my mitts than a suspect!’

  ‘It was DCI Sidney, actually.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Olivia in a tone of deep comprehension.

  Time to return to the real world.

  ‘Right, dearest, I’m going to drop you back at home and swing by the station. I can take my bad mood out on Noakesy if he’s around.’

  Reluctantly, they made their way towards the lights of the High Street.

  In the offices of Bromgrove CID, an unaccustomed peace reigned, the steady hum of strip lighting the only sign of life.

  The rest of CID would have been amused if they could have seen DS Noakes sitting in his fusty cubicle surrounded by back issues of Friends of St Mary’s. With a view to killing some time, he had embarked rather unenthusiastically upon the reading material thrust at him earlier as he left the unprepossessing little office at number 32 Acacia Avenue. Despite himself, however, he had become increasingly absorbed, his posture rapidly shifting from slumped apathy to alert interest.

  Sex and secrets. That was the thread running through it all, he realized with growing unease. It kept cropping up. ‘You must cherish the Master’s “hidden knowledge”.’ Noakes read the text aloud, following the words with a stubby forefinger. ‘A bid to recover the innocence of childhood via the renunciation of grosser sexuality ... finding pure warmth in the lap of young friends.’

  Bloody hell, no wonder O’Keefe had got the jitters.

  Then there was something called mystical regression. ‘The way of spiritual childhood … rejoice in the touch and warmth of young companions to conquer the forces of evil and enmity in the world, just as Christ called for eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.’

  As he read these unsettling words, another Biblical text bobbed unbidden to the surface of Noakes’s mind. Better for the man who harms one of these little ones to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck.

  A shower of loud taps at the window next to his cubicle made the DS almost jump out of his skin. Just the branches of a spindly elm directly outside the office, but the sound unnerved him nonetheless, as though the insistent rapping was a spectral call to attract his attention.

  Noakes’s eyes dropped once more to the text in front of him.

  A sentence immediately leaped out at him.

  Death is no skeleton with a scythe but rather an angel bearing a golden key.

  Skeletons.

  Noakes felt his chest tighten, his breath come short. Again, in the stillness of the room, he had the feeling that someone was calling to him, begging him urgently to decipher the code.

  Memories bubbled up like boils being lanced.

&nbs
p; Jonny Warr had played the sitar. He was mad for anything ‘alternative’. The missing boys had been through a hippy phase…

  Noakes felt as though some hideous poison was creeping through his system. Was O’Keefe right, then? Was this apparently innocuous little society the nucleus for an evil network of abusers?

  That list of subscribers. Perfect cover for paedophiles hiding in plain sight.

  With suddenly shaking hands, Noakes thumbed through the magazines.

  Yes, each issue featured Students of the Month. Bright-eyed handsome lads gazing out at the world from the pages of the little booklets, their sunshiny innocence undimmed by the cheap paper and amateurish photography.

  And then a note from a nightmare. The picture of Julian Forsythe staring up at him.

  A noise behind him.

  ‘Are you all right, Noakes? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Markham’s whole body tensed as he saw the picture of Julian.

  Oh God, no, please, no!

  There was no need for anything further. Noakes snatched up his mobile, moving with unaccustomed speed and decision. When he spoke, there was an undercurrent of hoarse urgency in his voice that Markham had never heard before.

  ‘Dr O’Keefe. DS George Noakes here. I need you to check the whereabouts of Julian Forsythe and get back to me on this number as soon as you’ve located him. Now!’

  The two officers gazed at each other in mute horror waiting to hear what they already knew.

  Julian was gone.

  ‘On our watch,’ groaned Markham.

  It sounded like an epitaph.

  13. Lengthening Shadows

  In the wan small hours of the following morning, Markham dragged himself through the front door of his apartment. Although badly in need of comfort and reassurance, he decided not to disturb Olivia and headed to the spare room to snatch a few hours’ broken sleep.

  Curled into a ball, peristaltic shudders coursed through him as he reviewed the night’s events.

  Most harrowing of all was the memory of Nat Barton’s shocked and bewildered face. His eyes red with crying, the boy was bustled away by protectively hovering staff once it became clear he could shed no light on the disappearance of Julian Forsythe. Nat was out of bounds to the police for the time being. Or at least until the school doctor had checked him over.

  Just before he was whisked off to the infirmary, however, Nat had sobbed out a question which reverberated agonizingly in Markham’s mind.

  ‘What made Julian go and leave me in the night?’

  This piteous reproach unlocked memories which Markham had thought were long buried. Memories of someone who had left him in the night never to return. The fair-weather father who had walked out on his family when Markham was nine years old, leaving behind a scorched earth legacy of silence and repression. They had never talked about it afterwards. Not once. Part of him closed off that night. Died.

  I should be glad of another death.

  Markham wondered how Nat would come to terms with the horror of Julian’s almost certain abduction and murder. Perhaps he too would simply embark on a project of denial – unhitch his friend from time and space, think of him as rolled round diurnally with rocks and stones and trees. Well wadded with pragmatism, he could only survive by erasing the past.

  Somehow, recalling Nat’s fine-boned spiritual face and the intensity of his bond with Julian, Markham felt it more likely that he would be eternally tormented by the dreadful irreversibility of his friend’s disappearance. The trusting peace of his confiding little soul would be forever poisoned, leaving a sense of loss that deepened every hour.

  Markham’s gut twisted with self-disgust at the realization that he had failed Julian Forsythe. Logic told him that there had been no reason to suspect that Julian or Nat was in any immediate danger, but emotion was a different story. He’d had an extrasensory awareness of danger or evil after the service in the cathedral. He’d felt it lurking there somewhere in that cool vaulted space. Wanting very much to get away from it, he had ignored the nagging sixth sense that something was off centre and admonished himself for being caught up in the hysteria of unfounded suspicion.

  Unfounded suspicion. Woodcourt.

  The canon, alerted by O’Keefe, had arrived quickly on the scene tonight. Amidst the chaos and confusion, he showed such fatherly concern for Nat and the frightened lads who clustered round him – counselling against the ‘grave sin of despair’ – that Markham doubted all over again. Could the man so earnestly exhorting staff and students to remember that God was with them really be a counterfeit priest?

  Police units had scoured every inch of the school complex, not excluding the chapel, basement shrine and grottoes. The search yielded no trace of Julian Forsythe. His bed in the little dormitory was neatly made up. Impossible to know if he had ever been in it that night. No-one could be certain of having seen him after tea. As though he had melted into the swarm of boys before slipping away unnoticed. As for the cathedral, it had been locked up earlier that night. A sweep of the premises had disclosed nothing.

  Again and again, Markham replayed that memory of the cassock-clad choristers vanishing down the cathedral processional ramp after the Sunday service. This time he called out to Julian to come back. But the slight dark figure never turned. He felt as though the sound of those receding footsteps would haunt him all his life.

  The abduction had to be an inside job. Had to be. How else could Julian have been spirited away from under the noses of staff and students? And yet, preliminary interviews indicated nothing out of the ordinary had occurred until just after 7pm when Noakes raised the alarm and a flurry of staff converged on the senior dormitory – the Sharpes and Woodcourt from the direction of their respective flats, O’Keefe from the Chaplain’s House and Cynthia, trailed by a sheepish Edward Preston, from her cottage on the north side of the cathedral. An emergency assembly was hastily organized, the junior boys blinking like little owls and the seniors affecting a desperate insouciance which deceived no-one. As word spread through the ranks that Julian Forsythe was missing, a ripple of disquiet passed through the room like an icy gust. Outside a gibbous moon hung in the black arcing sky as search parties fanned out across the grounds.

  At least they’d been spared Sir Philip Soames. A flare up of myasthenia gravis had left him too ill to leave the house. Markham felt a growing conviction that the Friends of St Mary’s was somehow a perfect breeding ground for the evil in this case. He did not relish informing St Mary’s patron that his cherished theosophical society had served as camouflage for a twisted commerce in children’s bodies.

  Markham’s thoughts turned back to the lost boy. He had no doubt that he was already dead. Just like the owner of the little plastic figurine he had found down in the grottoes.

  There had been something strangely touching about Julian, he reflected with wrenching sadness. Noli me tangere. It was that cloak of reserve – a sense of something withheld – which made him reluctant to violate the boy’s privacy. Lying there in the darkness, he admitted to himself that there had been another more selfish reason for his inhibition. The dread of touching a painful nerve and stirring up dormant memories of his own unhappy childhood.

  But he should have gone in harder. Should have pressed Julian about the Night Watchman. Should have…

  Markham ground his teeth in an agony of frustration. This self-flagellation would only divert his energies from the task in front of him. The utmost he could do for Julian was to crack the conspiracy. The meeting with Steve Sinnott would need to be brought forward as a matter of urgency…

  Markham’s exhausted mind began to drift, his thoughts flashing frantically hither and thither.

  Noakes. The DS had interrogated staff and students like a man possessed, his usual shambling gait and lazy affability nowhere to be seen, every barked instruction eloquent testimony to a gnawing self-reproach.

  Olivia. Her tender heart would break over Julian. How would he ever find the words to tell
her?

  With that last despairing thought, oblivion finally claimed him.

  Three hours later, Markham and Noakes sat grim-faced in the DI’s office at CID.

  Outside, a light dusting of snow turned Bromgrove Green’s familiar shop fronts to silvery filigree, the gaudy festive fripperies taunting the two men with their reminder of Christmas cheer. Toystop, in particular, with its Star Wars themed window display, was a heart-rending reminder of the missing boy’s enthusiasm for all things Jedi.

  Breaking the news of Julian’s disappearance to Olivia had been an ordeal.

  ‘Oh no, that poor boy,’ she whispered, her voice tight with distress. ‘He was so proud and excited when he showed me the school’s relics. And so protective of Nat. He didn’t have anyone else…’ Like Markham, she berated herself for negligence. ‘I didn’t do enough. I knew Julian was holding back, but he was so private that I didn’t like to pry. His thoughts were all he had.’ Tears ran down her face. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

  A lump came into Markham’s throat as he recalled his girlfriend’s passionate plea.

  ‘Julian never had much of a shot at life, Gil. Promise me you’ll nail the lowlife who did this.’ He had done his best to comfort her without, however, mentioning Woodcourt. The spinners of the spider’s web must be allowed to go on hatching their schemes until the time came to lure them out from their dark hiding places.

  Noakes too was taking Julian’s disappearance badly. Pouchy under the eyes, and sending up a shower of scurf every time he scratched his frowsy head, the DS looked even more shop-soiled than usual.

  ‘Friends of St Mary’s! Nowt but a cover for nonces!’ he exclaimed bitterly, flailing at the pile of magazines which fluttered like confetti about him. ‘Should have seen it right away.’ He gnawed impotently on his fist. ‘An’ that poor little bastard. Just didn’t get the breaks … life over before it’d even begun.’ Honking into a dingy hanky, he scowled at Markham as though daring the guvnor to contradict him.

  The DI’s intercom sputtered into life, making them start.