by L. J. Hutton
“Oh bollocks. I suppose bloody Damien could have come across like that in an urban setting, where he’d need to behave.”
“That’s what I thought. Apparently they’d met up in hotels for just the odd evening, but not for what you’d think. It seems that Melissa had been brought up religious, and even though she was hardly a virgin, she wasn’t about to start sleeping around with the first bloke who came on to her.”
“God, that really is tragic, isn’t it? She must have come out here really believing that this was the start of something very serious, and yet all Farrah wanted was to get into her pants. No wonder I felt her confusion and panic. She’d probably not even expected him to do any heavy snogging until they were back in the room, and then there she was, flat on her back on the cold ground and fighting for her last breath. Damn it, I really wish we could have got the bastard in jail for that. He got off too easy in my books, even if he was crapping himself in fright at the last. It didn’t go on for nearly long enough for it to be real justice.”
“I have to agree with you there.”
“But come on, Carol, don’t keep me in suspense. Why do you say that the other two are his father’s victims?”
He heard Carol laugh softly. “Oh, that’s too delicious for words! Mr bloody Montgomery Farrah went rummaging through his son’s room after the body had been found, and before the original murder team could seal the room. So of course he had to provide a DNA sample in order to exclude him from the search – although I think Chris Masters, who was the leading DI on that one, would have liked to nail him for something, even if it was only perverting the course of justice. Well I’ve taken great delight in ringing DI Masters up and telling her that it looks as though we’re going to get him on the much bigger charge of murder. God was she ever chuffed about that!
“You see, once I’d got the three of them on the table, it was obvious that those two had been there much longer than Melissa – and I’m talking here about at least ten years more for the one, and closer to fifteen for the other. And given the women’s ages, which were in their forties or thereabouts going on their bones, I just couldn’t see the then very young Damien being attracted to them. Not at the age he’d have been then. So I did some very careful scraping under their nails, and although what little DNA we got came back as a familial link to Damien’s, it was equally obviously not his. That was the stage when I checked them against what we had on file, and who should pop up as an exact march but his father!
“So when I reported that back to DI Masters – who’s practically chewed her DCI’s arm off to get the case – she didn’t hang about. Some fast going back over files and some research showed that back then, Montgomery Farrah had done a lot of travelling about, supposedly with his job. A dig back in the hotel’s records then showed that he, too, had gone there with various women.”
“Really?” Bill was surprised. “The hotel kept their records for that long?”
“Not things like credit card receipts, but those guest registers they did. Apparently they’d had some fairly well-known guests stopping there over the years. Oh, not real celeb’s! Just regional TV stars, and some local footballers. But enough that they wanted to be able to brag about it, and so they kept the registers because they’d got the signatures on them – sort of like an autograph book.”
“Well I never! And I suppose that there amongst them was old Farrah and his various flings?”
“Yep!” He heard Carol give another titter of amusement. “And in one of those strange ways that things come around, because one lot of the West Mids have so pissed off your lot, the ones over in Solihull have been falling over themselves to be helpful. They’re tracking all of the names nasty Monty put on the registers like so many bloodhounds, because the last thing anyone wants is to find that all of them are missing. Some are obviously false names, but Damien seems to have been much more clued up than his father as to how easy it would be to track names, whereas the old man for the most part let his women sign themselves in. You can see the different handwriting, because Jeff’s got the books in his lab, with his assistant deciding which is the old man’s handwriting and which the women’s.”
Bill sighed with relief. “But that’s something else, isn’t it? If we can prove that his father had already disposed of two women deep in the rushes whom he’d probably got too heavy-handed with, then for Damien to have dumped his victim exactly there too, his father had to have told him about how his corpses had never come to light. And what’s the betting that the subject never came up until Damien rang him in a panic saying, ‘she’s not breathing?’ So the father is an accessory in Melissa’s death too.”
“Indeed he is,” Carol said with satisfaction. “He won’t be seeing the outside world again for a very long time, and with any luck, his poor brow-beaten wife will have got far away from here by then.”
“But it also makes his aggression at your identification more explainable, doesn’t it? Farrah senior must have been horrified that some vengeful father or brother had come after Damien, given that he had to have already known what his son had done a few months before that; and presumably how brutal he was continuing to be with his women? That’s before you get onto the way that Damien’s ex-wives had had to be paid off. He’d always got away with it, but Damien didn’t. But on top of that, he must have been shitting bricks that the police would do a fingertip search of the whole hotel site. I mean, it’s not unknown for TV reports to show police divers dredging rivers or canals for missing weapons, is it? He had to have known it was a possibility.”
“Oh my God!” Carol gasped. “Of course! He’d have been frantic underneath all that bluster! And it was only because it had been a soaking wet day when Damien died, and the area all around the pools was so soft that you couldn’t have set foot on it without leaving a trace, that stopped the team from doing just that. It was just so clear that whoever had killed Damien couldn’t have gone that way – not even close enough to have thrown something as heavy as that sword that far into the water. Good grief! They scoured all the rest of the grounds, though. Jeff waded through tons of bits of soggy remains that had been dumped by careless guests, I do remember that.”
“Yet Farrah hasn’t evaded justice in the long run,” Bill said with satisfaction, “and at least in his case, the bastard has had to sweat for several months too.” Then another thought came to him. “Carol, can you pinpoint when Melissa went missing?
Had Melissa’s death tied in with when the mystery people would have been aware of it?
“It was the first weekend in November,” Carol said. “Halloween was on the Thursday night, and it looks like she died on the Saturday, because Damien checked out early on the Sunday even before breakfast, saying that his girlfriend was already in the car and that they’d had a row, so they were going home instead of staying any longer.”
But Bill was already looking up the moon phases. The new moon had come on the Sunday in the very early hours of the morning! Right within hours of Melissa’s death! So had he got this all wrong? Had the strange folk got involved because they’d witnessed Melissa’s death first? In which case, no wonder they had felt the need to rescue the two Mulligrew daughters if they’d feared that might also be their fate. Thomas wasn’t the first of the cases, one of Damien’s was – it just hadn’t been him who died that time!
Chapter 20
ON THE SUNDAY NIGHT, having made sure he took things easy on the previous couple of days so that he wouldn’t be wiped out for work the next day, Bill drove back up to the Mulligrews’ farm. Better prepared for what he was about to encounter this time, he’d got a pair of extra candle-lanterns with him, and fresh candles for the jars too. But beyond that, he’d also put his stab-vest on underneath his jacket. He sincerely hoped that he’d not misread the warrior’s intentions, and that he wasn’t in any danger from him, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Quite apart from the unholy mess it would land him in with work for not having spoken up sooner about what was happening in the
valley, he knew that if he was wounded he could lie there for days without anyone coming to find him. And with that in mind, he also took his walking poles with him. He wouldn’t be able to do much about a stab in the leg aside from tying it up, but with both poles he’d be able to hobble back down to the car. Again, what on earth he’d use as his excuse for getting stabbed out there was something he’d have to work on, but once at the farm he could at least say something like he’d come back to retrieve a dropped wallet and run into some derelict hiding out there. Up in the valley there’d be no such excuse.
Therefore he parked near to the farmhouse but where his car would be easily seen if he did need to call for help. Then picking up his rucksack with all the other bits in, he took a steady walk up the valley. It was already dark, and he needed to make sure that he didn’t go flat on his face by tripping over unseen rocks or roots.
He made it up there unscathed and set about preparing the altar area. The new candles were bigger church-candles, with a good long burn time, so he knew that they’d last well beyond anything he’d need tonight, but they were also scented. After his encounter with Tapio, Bill had found a candle-maker online down in Cornwall who produced proper beeswax candles, and had chosen the ones scented with spices as natural and yet strong enough to be smelled. So tonight he was hoping that if the strange ones didn’t notice the light, they might pick up on the scent given that nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon weren’t exactly native to Wales. Once that was done, though, all he could do was sit and wait, glad that this time he’d brought a couple of his garden cushions with him; that plank got damned hard after a while.
He wasn’t expecting anyone to show up straightaway, and was resigned to probably being here well beyond midnight. But he’d arrived around eight o’clock in order to leave plenty of time for his presence to be picked up on. If whoever they were had a distinct territory – and his previous conversation had hinted at that – then he had no idea how fast they would be able to travel across it. This might be the northernmost edge, because clearly they ranged down into Herefordshire for them to have picked up on the girls Justin Pickersleigh had dumped. The only thing he was halfway sure of was that they would be able to travel distances far faster than he could, especially if they were in their own place or dimension or whatever it was.
A little after he heard some very distant church clock strike eleven, he became aware of that sensation of being watched once more.
“It’s alright, I’ve just come to talk,” he called out softly. “I’m alone and unarmed. I don’t want any trouble. I just want to tell you what’s been going on since we last met.”
For a moment he thought they were going to leave him there and vanish, but then the tall warrior stepped into the candlelight, though where he had come from was something else altogether.
“We saw your people,” he said with a small formal nod of his head towards Bill in acknowledgment.
“At the quarry?”
“If that is what you call the place where the stones were robbed out, then yes.”
“So you know that all of the bodies have been removed? Hopefully the area will feel at least a bit cleaner for you now?” Bill thought that these folk would have picked up on the decay by senses beyond the obvious stench of the fresher corpses.
A woman, tall and slender with hair as dark as the warrior’s, appeared by his side. “Yes, it does. Thank you. It will take a while before the taint leaves that place, but your people were most thorough in picking everything up.”
Bill smiled at her. “That’s because we have ways of looking at all of those bits which will tell us a lot more than just what’s visible to the eye. I can’t begin to explain it to you, but just as you can sense things we can’t, we have ways of examining things that you don’t.”
“Have you managed to stop the others?” she asked hopefully. “Tarian-derw said that you would try?”
“Ah, yes, the rest of the gang in the city.” Bill wished that Setty hadn’t mucked that up quite so badly, because as yet there’d been no arrest of the Estonian, and he’d really wanted to tell these people that he’d been locked up. “Well they certainly won’t be bothering you anymore. They’ve had a nasty fright over us discovering those bodies – and thank you for guiding me towards them. I presume it was you who kept giving me those strange tingling feelings?”
“That was me,” another woman’s voice said, and this time Bill saw the golden-haired version. “I am Pelydryn, and this is my brother, Tarian-derw, and my sister Helyglys.”
“And I am Claerwyn,” said a third woman who stepped out of nowhere to join them. This had to be Pickersleigh’s woman with the hair like moonbeams, because her hair was not just blonde but a stunning, luminous white.
“I’m Bill Scathlock, and I’m very glad to meet you all. Even just seeing you helps me make some sense of what I’ve read.” He turned to Claerwyn. “You were the one who encountered Justin, weren’t you?”
“Yes!” she gasped in surprise. “How did you know?”
“From his description of you. We didn’t have much to go on, but knowing what I know now, that had to be you.” He turned to Helyglys. “Whereas you have to be the one who, erm... dealt... with Sanay Costa. I have to say that you were very brave to do that, and I wouldn’t recommend you tackle a man like that again. He was a very dangerous person to cross.”
“And you think I am not dangerous?” Helyglys asked with a slight edge in her voice.
“I think you undoubtedly have skills beyond anything I know of,” Bill readily admitted, “but did you see the man Vijay Bose using his weapon on the women at the quarry? It’s a gun, and it has a very long range. Much longer than you saw there. And unfortunately weapons like that are too easily got by men like them. You were lucky that Sanay didn’t have one, because I’m guessing that anything made of iron would be pretty dangerous to you?”
“How would you know that?” Tarian-derw asked suspiciously.
“Primarily from legends,” admitted Bill, “and from speaking to someone – though you’d hardly call him a person – who was ...well he was something like you. ...Erm, would it be possible for you to tell me exactly what you are? I’ve had a couple of brushes this year with people who weren’t human like me, and I’m beginning to realise that there are some big differences between you.”
Tarian-derw huffed disgustedly. “Another one who doesn’t know us when he sees us!”
But Claerwyn shushed him before saying, “We are the fae. Does that mean anything to you?”
“You’re elves!” Bill gasped, positively thrilled to realise who he was taking to.
“You see?” Claerwyn said to her brother. “Not all of them have forgotten or are ignorant.” Then smiled at Bill. “Yes, we are of the elven kin, though not many of us make our presence known to your kind now. We have learned to be wary.”
“Very understandable,” Bill sympathised. “I’ve had to be more than a bit careful myself about what I’ve said to those I work with. Our world has become a very dangerous place, I’m sad to say, and somewhere along the line we’ve lost most of our sense of wonder. Even in my lifetime – which must be very short compared to yours – I’ve seen a woeful decline in people’s awareness of nature and how amazing it can be.”
“That was the problem with the man you refer to as Bose,” Pelydryn said, with a flick of her head, and for the first time Bill saw what Sanay must have done – the stars flickering in the dark tresses. But Pelydryn was continuing, “When we showed him the life in everything, he saw only darkness and decay.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Bill admitted. “I never met him in person, but I know the type. Everything was about his worldly possessions. I doubt he’d ever had a spiritual moment in his life. I have a friend who looks at bodies to see how they died, you see, because it’s one of the ways we decide whether someone has died naturally or been killed. She said that Bose’s heart had given up, but that it looked very much as if he’d had a terrible shock. Well that w
as it, wasn’t it? You showed him how wide and wonderful the world is, and with him having thought he was a little god in his own bit of it, he couldn’t cope.”
Claerwyn smiled. “Very astute. Yes, that’s as good a description of what happened as one of your kind would understand it.”
“So what set you off on this path of avenger of innocents?” Bill finally felt able to ask. “Something happened. I know that this last year has seen an extremely rare clustering of violent deaths in the area, but you seem to have been aware of it long before anyone else. How did it start? Was it the woman who died at Damien Farrah’s hands?”
“You know about her?” Claerwyn asked hopefully.
“Yes, all three of them.”
“Three?” There was no mistaking the shock in Pelydryn’s voice there.
Bill nodded. “I did wonder whether you knew about the other two. They were quite a while before the poor soul you saw, and my clever friend has found evidence – that’s signs of proof – that it was his father who killed them. That man has been locked up and will stay that way for a very long time. But after you’d shown me what happened to Melissa, as we now know she was called, I knew Damien had to have hidden her body close by. That’s why I asked the gardener to drain the pond, but I wasn’t expecting him to discover two more women. So when he did, it made me wonder whether you had known about them, because I felt sure you would have found a way to let me know about them if you had.”
“No, we didn’t know,” Pelydryn sighed sadly.
“Would that be because they died at times of the month when you weren’t coming through to our space?”
She nodded. “Almost certainly. Can your friend tell whether they died in the same way?”