by Ben Oakley
A few minutes later as I was shown out of the station, I just wanted to tell her it was a cellar again. Basement made it sound like I was abducting girls for a living, and I certainly wasn't doing that. But her words were repeating in my head.
Five mile radius, Mr. Harrison Lake, that's your new world.
Eleven
It was late by the time I got home, the Sun had vanished from the sky and the aroma of the night had come to the fore. Even though I considered myself lucky enough to have lived in a good area of Hampstead Heath, I still got the full whiff of the evening's takeaways. Alongside the extraordinary amount of incense in the area.
That was worthy of a report one day.
Just before I opened my front door, I glanced over to the street just to see if Paine had been correct about the car keeping watch. Indeed, there he was, three cars along, plain as anything. Took me a moment to notice as it wasn't a patrol car but a plain dark blue one with a single person sitting in the passenger seat.
He nodded at me to confirm he was watching, I supposed. Then it occurred to me he most likely thought I was guilty, as most did. My heart sunk again as I thought of what had happened to bring me to this point. I had a fear of even walking through my front door.
It took a few more seconds but I found myself inside with the door shut and locked firmly behind me. I looked through the hallway to the kitchen and really didn't want to do it, but I knew I would.
While I was in custody, a team of forensic specialists had gone over the house looking for anything that might help them. The cellar in particular had been wiped clean, photographed, sampled and tested. They had even taken some scrapings of the brick wall which would have been necessary but annoyed me for some reason. I guess they had to prove my innocence somehow.
I took a long deep breath, not for the first time in recent hours and made my way to the cellar. For this, I needed some help. My Oculus boss, Melissa 'Mel' Harvey, always had my back and I needed some advice.
As I walked down the steps and into the cellar, I was hit with the aroma of the room. Less mouldy wine and fresh blood but more bleach and chemical-based. They really had gone over the entire room. I turned the light on and the image of Stansey King flashed before my eyes. I jumped ever so slightly and blinked it away.
I called Mel and looked more closely at the room to see if they had missed anything. She answered pretty quickly, she always did, no matter the time of day or night.
“Harrison, what you gone and done now?” she whined in her thick Devonshire accent.
Mel was never one for beating around the bush. I respected her more than I could ever let on. Her work on The Oculus Quarterly was an enviable lesson in editorial nuance and she oversaw the additions to the database on a daily basis. Although I never entirely trusted her judgement on the relevancy of certain stories, she did hold sway in what had become a burgeoning industry.
“It wasn't me,” I said with absolute certainty.
“You think I don't know that? Any connections with the girl?”
Her twenty-year reign in magazine publication had all but been thwarted by the internet age. At fifty-six, she was already slowing her output and looked to people like me to hold the banner high when the time might come for a change at the top.
“I haven't had time to research yet but I've never seen her before in my life, never even heard the name until today. I'm back in the cellar now, could do with a little help.”
“What did forensics get?”
“Looks like they've taken everything except the foundations.”
“What does your gut tell you, Harrison?”
“To go to Hawaii, sit on a beach next to a rum shack, maybe do a little jet-skiing.”
“Why don't you?”
“They've restricted my movements, five mile radius of the house. I'm trapped here, so I need to work this shit out.”
“They've trapped you? You think it was intentional?”
“I think everything until this point has been deliberate.”
“Go on.”
“It's not an accident she was in my cellar.”
“Then the girl is the key.”
Suddenly my mind shot back to what the girl had said about a pond being the key. Did I hear it wrong? Was it the stress of the situation? If it was real then I had no idea what the hell was going on.
“I'm tired, Mel.”
“Harrison, I'm passing any of your current workload onto some of the newbies.”
“I can cope with it all, don't worry.”
“No. There's only one case, one story you need to focus on right now and I don't need to tell you what it is.”
There was nothing in the cellar that was off in any way. The team that had been in here had done their work and it looked like they had done it pretty well.
Mel continued, “get some rest, Harrison. Looks like you're gonna need it.”
She hung up abruptly, always did, never one for hanging around for small talk. I dropped the phone in my pocket and traipsed back to the kitchen which had that same intrusive chemical smell. The drawer I'd broken was still on its side but the cutlery had been laid out in an organised fashion on the floor. All the knives had gone, I assumed for testing.
I didn't usually cook, I tended to eat out, but I was sure I'd never cook in the kitchen again, at least not for myself. Generally, I was travelling a lot of the time. There were only so many stories in and around Camden and I thought I had exhausted those pretty sharpish.
When I was on the road, food consisted of supermarket meal deals, Indian takeaways, noodle bars and the occasional organic cafe. It was surprising I had remained so trim as the years had progressed. Most hotels had gyms and I always took advantage of those where I could. I didn't jog much, twice a month maybe when I felt I needed it. I certainly wasn't a fitness fanatic but I liked to remain in shape.
I looked around the lounge and pictured the girl cowering in the corner. It wasn't often I was bamboozled but this whole thing had confused me. I had never been the meat of the investigation myself and the whole thing had knocked me for six.
That was where I was struggling. This whole thing was literally too close to home, this was in my home and it was rare I was actually there in the first place. Maybe six days out of a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Whenever I was home, I was researching.
I had three rooms on the top floor dedicated to research material, maps, databases and stories to work on. It was a veritable goldmine of information that some others would have paid a top price to go through or purge.
Then it dawned it me, I had to know more about the Blood Streams.
Twelve
It was just after midnight when I decided to start researching Stansey King and the Blood Streams. The third floor of the house was dedicated to my work. I slept on the second floor, had spare rooms on the first floor, and ate and lived on the ground floor. To be fair, I would usually eat while in one of the research rooms so never really needed a kitchen-diner.
Research room one was a database of files and stories I'd worked on, almost all of them had been solved or written about. Room two was the unsolved room, a digital and hardcopy collection of unsolved cases and mysterious stories I had either worked on or was attempting to work on.
Most of it was dedicated to my research of Red Autumn; a mysterious girl who had been rampaging throughout the world, taking victims as she pleased. No one believed me that over a hundred murders were connected to her. I knew something else was going on and it had consumed the last ten years of my life but I would get back to that soon enough.
Which brings me to room three; the work room, it was where the magic happened. I only used it when I was there and most of the time I only worked on stories with a laptop, even though there was a pretty decent desktop system nearby. There were post-it-notes and maps strewn all over the walls. It looked chaotic and it was but I knew what all of it meant, it was my organised chaos.
I checked my emails first of all, the most re
cent one held my attention. It was an invitation. I opened the PDF and read the short but sweet couple of lines.
Dear Mr. Harrison Lake,
You are cordially invited to join us at the Portent Hotel to celebrate our long and illustrious history. We would be honoured if you would stay the night in what will be the last night the hotel will ever be open.
Sincerely, John Capperfoot.
“It's a possibility,” I said to myself. “what's so special about your hotel?”
I shoved it to the back of my mind. Maybe I shouldn't have opened the email. I took out a bottle of Japanese whisky from the drawer beside my desk and poured myself a small glass. If anything I was hoping it would knock me out so I could actually get a decent night's sleep.
After a sip and a mild slap to my face to wake myself up, I got to work on Stansey King. It was clear from the news reports I was seeing, that the girl in my cellar was not the Stansey King they had pulled from the canal. They looked similar, there was no denying it, but they weren't quite the same. Although they would have been difficult to tell apart from a distance.
Some of the headlines were typical media pomp and circumstance.
Is the latest victim found in London's canal system a victim of a serial killer?
Has the Blood Streams Killer struck again?
Body of a girl found, butchered, floating in London's sewers.
Blood Stream fears revived after sewer body discovery.
Relatives of dead raise claims of multiple murders.
Spectre of 'Canal Killer' lingers as 56 fall foul to death-trap canals
The real Stansey King had been found in the sewers just off the Wenlock Basin area of the Canal system, a couple of miles west of Camden Lock. The details of her murder were few and far between. Some said she had been murdered, others claimed it was an accident. The Metropolitan Police had unsurprisingly claimed that details had been vague and any talk of a serial killer had never been confirmed.
It didn't surprise me, if Detective Paine's denial was anything to go by. I felt like I was going to need a further chat with her at some point. I jumped from the news sites to local forums. I'll be honest, I wasn't too clued-up on the Blood Streams and I had mistakenly assumed it to be something to do with gangs.
It never surprised me that I failed in researching something like this so close to my home. I was never at home enough to make it worth my while but I was certainly in the deep end now.
I found a forum called Deep London that offered lots of conspiracies and I didn't know which ones needed more investigation than not. I was slightly worried what kind of content was on the forum, judging by the name, but it was a generic conspiracy and paranormal one.
Most subject headings were questions and curiosity, and most chats were just people showing off their armchair knowledge. I joined as a guest and went to the Blood Streams thread to read the latest discussion.
canalkillerx – I don't get it, why are they called the Blood Streams?
deadcalm1978 – cuz the victims die in the water and the canal turns blood red. It's all connected, the basins, the sewers, the canals.
canalkillerx – how many bodies have been found, then?
deadcalm1978 – 102 we reckon in the past six years. 27 of those are unsolved or not even being investigated. Stupid-ass police think they all connected to drug gangs or accidents. It just ain't true. There's a slayer out there stalking those systems.
LoadedWeapon – I heard that some people who went missing for only 2 days had their dates of death all screwed up. When the coroner done his thing, they said the body had been dead for like 10 days but they had only disappeared 2 days ago. What's up with that, man? Something really messed up is going on in those canals.
I didn't know what was true or not. It was getting too late, of that I was sure. Something had got the locals riled and the police were hiding something. I couldn't think what they would be scared of. Maybe they just didn't know what they were dealing with.
It was like the Yorkshire Ripper conspiracy. That was when the police claimed to have caught the Yorkshire Ripper but conspiracy theorists claimed they had only captured a copycat Ripper. Thus the real Yorkshire Ripper was still killing after the copycat's conviction. The police then covered up further killings as they didn't want the media latching on or having them seen as inept in the eyes of the public.
I was digressing in my tiredness. I scrolled a little further back to an earlier thread and one post from deadcalm1978 stood out more than others.
deadcalm1978 – the roadworks near the Camden Market are clearly a cover-up. Whatever they're doing there, that ain't no construction site.
I couldn't help but think back to what Jess had said in the bar about those roadworks. It had to be my first port of call. As much as I needed the sleep, I was firing myself up. I stood and walked over to a large map of central London, ripping off the post-it-notes I had used for some other stories.
I tied a bit of string to a green pin and placed it were my house was located in Hampstead Heath. I used the distance code to measure five miles out. Paine had roughly explained to me where I could go but I needed to be sure. I grabbed a pencil and tied it to the string, then drew a perfect circle.
I stepped back and focused on the five mile restriction zone. This was it, I was trapped within that circle of the city until this thing was solved.
I wasn't going anywhere until the truth came out.
Thirteen
I awoke later than usual but it wasn't the first time. I felt I kind of needed the rest after what had happened. Unsurprisingly, the police car outside my house had gone. I'd check in with Paine later and find out why.
The walk was quick enough, I bypassed The Ribnik in Kentish Town, first of all. To my surprise, it was closed. It was only ten in the morning but most pubs and bars were open at that time in the city. Jess was my first port of call so I was a little frustrated that she was still closed. I needed to talk to her.
I had never driven a car in my life. When I was fourteen, my parents moved around the world on business and I was left with my grandparents for a number of years. They didn't drive and I'd end up walking everywhere or getting a bus if I needed to go further than my legs could take me.
From my late teens onwards, I lived in various cities until my parent's deaths brought me back to the house. Wherever I was, public transport was so good that I didn't need a car. I'm pretty sure I've even saved money by not driving.
I took the long way around, through Camden Gardens and over the canal to Buck Street where I cut across to Camden High Street and headed northwards to the markets. There was something about Camden I thrived on; the freedom of the people and the atmosphere the centre produced. The colourfulness of the town was second only to Notting Hill during carnival weekend and that was an explosion of cultural mayhem.
It wasn't the best place in London but if you kept yourself to yourself then no trouble came your way. Still, it was safer than Lewisham or Brixton on one of their bad days.
The central market areas were rammed already and I didn't expect anything less. People came to Camden from all over the world to shop in the markets and experience the atmosphere. I would hear accents and languages from places I'd never even heard of.
As I had awoken late, the rising sun had crept up on me faster than I would have liked. I suddenly felt myself physically wake back up and pushed onto my first location. It was only a minute's walk later when I found myself looking up at the name of a cocktail and coffee bar on the south-east side of the canal.
The Outhouse served breakfast all day alongside a cocktail list I couldn't even pronounce. Yet, they did have a selection of coffees from all over the world that I was definitely going to take advantage of. The day before had knocked me sideways and I was honestly struggling with focusing on much at all.
Inside, it was as good as expected and I was surprised I hadn't been there before. A worthy rival to the Starbucks and Wetherspoons that plagued the Capital. It had Sev
enties style artwork on the walls and thick wooden tables and chairs. It had a slightly darkened atmosphere which suited the plentiful wood and décor.
I decided I'd get a better view by sitting outside.
A clean table, on a balcony overlooking the canal was perfection. Fifty metres away on the main road and underneath the bridge, the so-called roadworks were in full action-mode. It looked like construction workers were coming in and out of large tents on the bridge and on the canal's towpaths.
Piles of tarmac lined the area and large red and white barriers secured the area from the public. It did look like roadworks or some kind of construction. It almost appeared as if they were working on the underside of the bridge. If this wasn't roadworks then it was a pretty damn good act.
A young waitress walked over with a giant menu of tapas and bar snacks. The style of the bar was embedded in the staff uniform; darkened reds with black adornments. The waitress's hair was tied back in a tall ponytail and her name-badge read; Daisy.
“Just a coffee will do,” I said, “can you do a jug of coffee for two – for one?”
“Long night?” she replied.
“You have no idea!”
She went away and I watched her behind the busy counter, squeezing in amongst the other staff, all doing their best to maintain the frenetic pace. Turns out I'd hit the morning rush hour. But then I assumed every hour was a rush hour.
Daisy was a young white girl, possibly late teens, eager to please and had a rare smile on her face. She might have had an accent, possibly Polish, but having lived in London for a while, her accent had smoothed out.
I spied on the other staff; two black men, one black girl, another white girl and an older white man, who I assumed to be the manager. Daisy came back, all too eagerly. I gave my thanks and then accosted her briefly.