The Gathering Man (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 7)

by M K Farrar

  They marched him out to the car and shoved him into the back, making sure the rear doors were locked behind him.

  “Is this man our cult leader?” Erica wondered out loud. “It doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “If he was supposed to be Peter Woodhouse’s alibi, but he was out killing Stacey Ford, what was Mr Woodhouse doing?”

  “He lied, too. You think they might be in on this together?”

  “Think of everything else we’ve seen. Those images of people in white smocks. That we think there might have been more than one person there when Stacey was killed.”

  “You think one of them is the leader,” she finished.

  “Exactly. And who fits the profile more?”

  “The headteacher. Shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “It’s time, Bethany.”

  She hadn’t repented. She hadn’t done anything except lie on the small fold-down bed and cry until she was exhausted, and then drifted off to sleep. She’d known there hadn’t been any point in trying the door. She’d heard the click of the lock turning after he’d left, and the room was windowless.

  Yet she felt she was being watched. The huge effigy of Jesus Christ on the wall, beyond the lines of prayer cushions on the floors, seemed to be staring down at her, judging her. There were other images as well, the same ones that were on the necklace she’d given to Florence. She desperately wished she could go back and make different choices. She’d even have preferred going to school and dealing with Amber and her friends rather than going through this.

  Doubts had begun to set in again. “Please, I really don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Nonsense. The others are here to thank you, too.”

  People poured down the stairs, and she was engulfed by a sea of arms, the air filled with exclamations of love and pride and thanks. They stroked her hair and cupped their palms to her cheeks and kissed her forehead. It was impossible not to be buoyed on this flood of praise.

  Maybe she was in the right place after all. She shouldn’t doubt so much. If everyone else thought this was the best thing for her to do, how could she go back on it?

  Only one person didn’t approach her, but she was used to that. Joel was always a little separated from the others, different in a way even she couldn’t fully understand.

  “Here, everyone,” their leader said, pulling out bundles of white cloth from a couple of large bags in the corner. “It’s important we remain unsullied by material things.” He handed one of the items to her. “You, too, Bethany.”

  She held it up. It was a kind of shapeless dress. Then she saw everyone, even the men, had the same item. So not a dress. A smock? Did men wear smocks?

  These men did, it appeared, and she wondered why she was concerning herself with such things. What did it matter anymore? What did any of it matter? She’d got herself caught up in a web and she didn’t know how to break free. If only she was a different kind of person, a stronger one, someone who didn’t feel the need to yank out her own hair when she was distressed like some crazy person.

  “Is it going to happen here?” she dared ask.

  He smiled at her. “No, we need to be with nature, surrounded by fresh air and trees and with our toes connecting with the ground.”

  “How are we going to get there?”

  “We’ll walk. It’s not far.”

  Could she make a run for it then? She didn’t think she had it in her. She felt as though she’d been caught up in a tide and she’d been swimming for so long that she no longer had any strength left to fight it.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go.”

  He helped her to her feet, his grip strong on her forearm. He wasn’t going to let go, and she didn’t have the strength to yank herself out of his hold. The mood surrounding the others was strangely high, excited and jovial, as though they were going on an outing to a funfair.

  Together, they climbed the stairs into the house. He stopped to push the piece of furniture back in front of the small door and hide where he’d been keeping her, and she realised it had probably been in front of the door the whole day. As a group, with her at its centre, they walked the streets. It was dark, and Bethany had no idea of the time, but she suspected it was late. They must have made a strange sight, all dressed in white. Cars drove past them, and she felt sure someone would stop to ask what they were doing, or would report them to the police. But this was London, and strange people walked its streets every day. The people in the cars would probably convince themselves that this odd gathering were simply on their way back from a fancy dress party, or perhaps were even actors in some kind of play.

  They’d never have guessed the truth.

  They entered the park, streetlights positioned at regular intervals along the path. But he stepped off the path and drew her towards the inner circle of the park, where it was nothing but darkness. The sky was a wedge of black, no stars visible in the light-polluted night sky. The others followed.

  Tears trickled down her cheeks, and she hadn’t even realised she’d been crying.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Joel walked alongside the others. They all seemed happy, celebratory, a bounce in their steps, but he couldn’t find that feeling inside himself. He walked shoulder to shoulder with them, his cheeks tweaked as though to mirror the expressions of the others, but it wasn’t real. He was acting, and he’d never been a very good actor. It felt too much like lying.

  There was one other person who seemed not to share the joy of the others.

  The girl. Bethany.

  Though she forced a smile when their leader glanced her way, her face was streaked with tears. He didn’t really understand what she was upset about, or what any of them were really doing, but deep down he knew it was wrong.

  Their leader joined his side. “Is everything okay, Joel?”

  Joel didn’t speak for a moment, pinching his lips together. “Are we going to hurt her?”

  “Sometimes the body needs to go through physical pain to become something else. Does a woman not go through agony to become a mother?”

  Joel didn’t know about any of that.

  “She won’t be in pain,” he continued.

  “But you gave each of us these.” Joel held out his palm in which the single razor blade sat still covered in a protective packaging of paper and cellophane. Before they’d gone down beneath the stairs in the house, their leader had given each of them one of these and explained how they needed to use them to make the marks on Bethany’s skin.

  “Yes, I did, but it isn’t something to be frightened of. Each of the cuts release her energy to us.”

  “But...cuts hurt.”

  “They won’t hurt her. It’ll be as though she’s sleeping.”

  “She can’t sleep out here.”

  The only place Joel could ever go to sleep was when he was in bed. Even then, he needed everything to be exactly right—he had to be wearing his pyjamas, and have the feather pillow, and have the right sized glass of water beside his bed. If any of those things were wrong, it worried him, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep. How could Bethany sleep out in the open with lots of people around her?

  Their leader huffed out a breath of irritation. “If you don’t partake in the ritual, there’s no point in you being here. This works because each of us makes an equal commitment to the cause. There’s no room for doubters.”

  Joel sensed the weight of the other man’s gaze on him, making him smaller and smaller. He’d always been intimidated by men like their leader—people so confident in themselves and what they said that they made Joel feel even more dumb just by being around them. Joel knew he always got things wrong, so maybe he was wrong about this as well.

  “I-I’m not a doubter.

  But he was, and the knowledge of that doubt filled him with shame. Why couldn’t he be like everyone else? They all had so much trust and faith, where every part of him screamed wrong-wrong-wrong. He wanted to pull at his hair a
nd beat his fists against his head and just yell until his voice blocked out all the thoughts. Why had he come here? He’d have preferred to have no friends than go through this. He didn’t understand why no one else was doing anything.

  Everyone wanted to be with their leader, to be the one he paid the most attention to, to be the one who walked by his side. As they moved through the park, each of their group jostled for his attention, wanting to bask in his glory.

  Joel was happy to have their leader pulled away from him. He didn’t like to be the sole focus and he worried that he’d be discovered as being a fake, as not belonging.

  He was able to sink into the group and found himself beside the girl.

  “You okay, Bethany?” He had to say her name slowly, in three syllables, to make it sound right.

  The girl lifted her tear-streaked face to him and nodded. “I’m going to a better place, Joel, and I’m pathing the way for each of you to follow.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “Because I’m going to miss my—” Her voice broke, and she clamped her hand over her mouth before she started again. “My sister, and even my mum and dad, though I’m not sure they’re going to miss me.”

  “Then why do you want to go, if you’re going to miss your sister too much?”

  “Because I’ve been chosen.”

  Joel looked around at the others. “They can choose someone else.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s too late.”

  Their leader guided them through the park, away from all the lit pathways and onto grass, where they could vanish between trees. No one would be able to see them now—not that there were many other people in the park at this time in the morning. He wondered if his grandmother had noticed he’d slipped out of the house? He hoped not. He would be in big trouble if she had. But most of the time, after she’d gone to bed, she didn’t get up again until six in the morning.

  The girl stood in the middle of them all, while the others created a circle around her.

  Joel took a few steps back, hoping no one would pay him any attention. People tended not to notice him. If he kept his head down and didn’t say much, he blended into the background. One time, he’d been trying to get some chips down at the fish and chip shop, and people just kept pushing past him. Even the people behind the counter hadn’t noticed him standing there for twenty minutes with his pound coins growing sweaty in his hand. In the end it had been a young girl, maybe only eight years old—though he struggled to judge other people’s ages—who had seen him. The girl’s father had stepped past him, but the girl had stopped her dad and said, “He’s next.” Joel had been so grateful to that little girl, wishing he’d had the confidence to speak up for himself. The father had blinked at him and gone, “Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there,” and the feeling that he was invisible had only intensified. But once they’d seen him, so it seemed, did everyone else, and the person behind the counter finally served him and he got his chips, with lots of salt and vinegar, the aroma stinging his nostrils, and went home happy. Of course, his grandmother had demanded to know where he’d been and said she’d been about to send a search party out for him, but for once he didn’t mind.

  Joel was using that invisibility now to step further and further from the group. Everyone was focused on Bethany in the centre or on their leader. He held his arms out to them all, gathering them all into him, offering them reassurance and comfort. But for Joel, that all seemed fake now. The only thing that mattered to him was the girl standing there with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  He needed to get help. That’s what his grandmother had always told him to do when someone was upset or hurt. Go and get help. She’d always known that he wouldn’t have been able to do anything himself to help the person, but he had legs and he had a voice, and he could find someone else who would know what to do.

  He didn’t like the dark either, and the more distance he put between him and the group, the darker it got. Trees pressed in on either side, and their branches overhead hid the moon and stars from sight. His heart beat too fast, and a painful lump tightened in the back of his throat. He didn’t want to cry like a baby, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop himself. He was terrified their leader would notice him backing away and would shout and demand to know where he was going.

  His foot caught on an exposed tree root, and he stumbled and almost fell. Somehow, he managed to catch his voice in his mouth, and not let his shout of surprise leave his lips. If he’d yelled out, he’d be noticed, and all of a sudden Joel realised he didn’t want to be noticed more than anything he’d ever wanted in the world.

  His breath left his body in short gasps. Panic threatened to overwhelm him, but he kept going. He expected shouts to follow him, but either no one had noticed that he’d gone, or else they didn’t think he was worth bothering with.

  He needed to get home, to go and tell his grandma what was happening. She would know what to do. The route would take him past his house, but that didn’t matter. Their leader wasn’t there anymore, was he?

  He was back in the park about to hurt the girl.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A search had been done on Jim Mackay’s house, but nothing had been found.

  Bethany Emerson wasn’t there, and not only that, there was no sign she had ever been there. Jim Mackay had also kept his mouth shut, refusing to speak without a solicitor that they were in the process of bringing in, but Erica didn’t have time to wait around for him.

  Peter Woodhouse.

  She could kick herself for not spotting it sooner. He met the profile, a man in a position of power, charming, charismatic. He’d also had the opportunity to meet both Stacey and Bethany. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t suspected him.

  A girl’s life was in jeopardy, and there hadn’t been any time to waste.

  She’d quickly put together a team to go to Peter Woodhouse’s home, and now the police vans were pulled up on the street outside of his house. His car was still in the driveway, so either he was home, or he’d gone out and walked.

  Shawn let out a low whistle as he took in the property. “Headteachers must be on a pretty good salary to afford a place like this.”

  “I think they are, especially if they’ve proven themselves capable of pulling an underperforming school up a grade or two.”

  “So he’s good at his job. Shame he’s a murdering psycho.”

  Erica motioned for the uniformed officers to step in. Another team of officers were already around the back of the house, preventing any chance of him making a run for it. She prayed they weren’t too late.

  One of the officers tried the door, and then, upon finding it locked, donkey-kicked. It took a couple of tries—the locks were strong—but finally it swung open. He stepped inside, calling out “Police!” as he went. Colleagues followed, and Erica and Shawn went after them.

  Shouts of “Clear!” came from each of the rooms as uniformed officers made their way through the house.

  Erica was starting to get a bad feeling about this. “He’s not here, and neither is Bethany. Fuck.”

  The sense that time was running out for Bethany overwhelmed her. If the girl died because they hadn’t been able to find her, she’d never forgive herself. Damn it. She’d sat right in front of the son of a bitch, and he’d smiled and shaken her hand, and she’d had no idea.

  “We need to interview the neighbours. Someone might have seen him leaving with her, and the chances are there were others with him, too. They might be wearing long white outfits.”

  She stopped in the hallway and looked around. There had to be something here, she was sure of it. Erica glanced down and frowned. What was that? She took a glove from her pocket and put it on, then stooped down and picked up a clump of hair from the floor.

  Her heart lurched. “I’ve found something!” She held up the hair for others to see. “I think this might be Bethany Emerson’s. She pulls out her own hair.” But why this spot? Bethany pulled out her hair when so
mething was particularly distressing. Something had upset her.

  She turned a circle, and her gaze lit upon the hallway unit for coats and shoes. It was up against the side of the staircase at a slightly awkward angle.

  “Help me,” she called out, pressing her shoulder to one end of the unit.

  Shawn and a couple of other officers joined her, and they pushed the unit out of the way, revealing a small door under the stairs. Erica yanked it open, discovering a set of wooden stairs beyond. A light was already on down there, but the angle of the staircase and the low ceiling made it impossible to see any further.

  “Bethany? The police are here.”

  She moved with caution, taking step after step until she was finally in what appeared to be a converted cellar.

  There was no sign of the girl.

  The room was set out like a kind of chapel, with an altar at the front and the sort of knee cushions found in a church placed on the floor in rows. Images of the symbols cut into Stacey Ford’s body were painted like Chinese ideograms onto canvas and mounted around the walls. At the head of the room, above an altar, was an image of Jesus Christ.

  She’d already had little doubt that they had the right man, but now there was no room for uncertainty. Peter Woodhouse was definitely the man they were after.

  “I think someone’s been kept here,” one of the uniformed officers called out to her.

  Erica moved to join him. At the back of the cellar was a small, fold-out bed, with a bucket beside it. On the floor, partly hidden beneath the bed, was an empty pizza box and a paper cup and bag.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she said. “We need to get SOCO in here. This room will be rife with evidence.”

  “Already on it.”

  Erica dropped to a crouch and with her gloved hand pinched what she’d found on the floor and lifted it for the others to see.

  More strands of hair.

  “I think we can safely say we found where he was keeping Bethany, but where are they now?”