Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  “Louise explained that compliance was ensured by her and Sara being injected with a substance whose symptoms—dissociation of mind and body, regular hallucinations, confusion and agitation, and even panic attacks—suggested the impact of ketamine. But gradually, as days became weeks and then months, this enforced medication was withdrawn, leaving the two women as obedient as dominated dogs.

  “By this time, Louise claimed, the pair of them lived wholly like animals. She revealed that on the few occasions Hartwell spoke to either of them, he’d say things like ‘Only those closest to beasts can ever provide a way to reach them,’ and ‘The Old Ones will rise again.’ At a later stage, they were raped, Harry. Each was chained to a bed and forced to observe while the other suffered such degrading treatment.

  “On these occasions, they’d been so profoundly abused for so long that they could hardly perceive anything. Nevertheless, Louise told me that she retained at least a few impressions from such episodes. She explained that whenever Hartwell performed this sordid act, he’d wear a black balaclava, as if he was ashamed of getting intimately involved in his sick game. That was consistent with something I learned later when I inquired into the man’s background. A former female tutor I spoke to by telephone, who’d known him as a student at Durham University, suggested that Hartwell had found intimacy uncomfortable, flinching away from physical contact. And to her knowledge, he’d never had a lover in five years of study, during either his undergraduate or postgraduate periods.

  “Are you beginning to understand the full picture, Harry? Can you see where all this is leading? I certainly hope so, but let me add one more thing: toward the end of their ordeal—and I’ll explain how it finished in a moment—Hartwell started whispering a new set of messages to each woman, especially during those sex attacks when one or the other would usually scream out in horror. In a sinister whisper, which apparently softened his Irish accent, the man had said, ‘That’s the way, my dear—louder and louder, but never loud enough to waken them,’ and then, to Louise and Sara simultaneously once he’d finished with both, ‘You are essential, but what follows will be the true siren of depravity.’ ”

  Peter Marsh, who also called himself Greg Church, went silent, as if revisiting all this material after more than three decades had taken a lot out of him emotionally. I could imagine the impact of such knowledge on a relatively young man—after all, wasn’t I now a similar age as he’d been back then? And it was possibly worse for me, because, unlike him and his professional distance, I was personally involved in the case: my brother was the offspring of one of these poor victims.

  Christ, I realized, thinking about the final stage of humiliation both women had suffered, Dexter might even be Thomas Hartwell’s son.

  I was frightened and didn’t know what to think; my mind flitted around all the information I’d been offered, the way a fly is drawn to a corpse. One moment, I was thinking about a phrase of Hartwell’s with which I was already familiar—“The Old Ones will rise again,”—and the next I focused on that with which my informant had ended, the utterly disturbing “siren of depravity.”

  I was lost, bewildered, my heart galloping like a thoroughbred stud. Oh God, what they’d been forced to do with a horse, I reflected, and then: Not to mention being drugged with animal tranquillizer.

  That was when I twisted away from the onlooking journalist and glanced again at the drawings I’d inspected earlier. Judging by what the man had suggested during his sickening monologue, it sounded like Hartwell had been using Louise Patterson and Sara Linton as an alarm system, corrupting their bodies and minds until, the process enhanced by their chromosomal purity, they were capable of producing shrieks of primal terror—loud enough to awaken monsters in even the deepest, lengthiest of slumbers.

  Looking away from the sketches and paintings, I glanced back at my host, my voice shaking as I said, “How…how did it all end? Please—I need to know. Did Hartwell finally practice his occult ritual, the one he’d been preparing the…the women for?”

  “No, he did not,” my companion replied, and wasted little time in adding more. “This is where Louise—who said that up until this stage she’d been less vehement in protest than Sara—begins to shine. As I’ve said, the treatment both women received lasted from 1979 to 1982, and in the later stages they received no drugs at all. But toward the end, Louise had become cunning, pretending for a long time that she was weaker than she was, acting dumb whenever Hartwell visited her room, appearing soporific and unable. But the truth was that, although she was changed by her experiences, a rebellious part of her remained angry. She told me that this—the way she’d moved from being a happy young woman to such a vengeful wreck—was enough to keep her keen. And that was how she escaped.”

  “Escaped? Oh, wow. I’m relieved to hear that. So…what happened next?”

  “Nothing too dramatic. One day, when Hartwell arrived in her room and started tugging her from bed, she pretended to be sluggish and disoriented, while being anything but. And when he turned away, she struck, punching him in the back of the head and knocking him to the floor. Then she stamped on him, first on his ribs and soon his skull. She said there wasn’t much left of his face by the time he’d finished, even though she was naked and had used only her bare feet.

  “Once assured he was dead, she went out into the hallway and accessed the second bedroom also serving as a prison cell, letting out Sara Linton.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Yes, indeed. Makes the heart sing, doesn’t it? I must admit that by this point in Louise’s narrative, I was also cheering along.” My informant paused, adjusted his spectacles, but then resumed. “Anyway, once the two women—who hadn’t been allowed to speak together during the three years they’d lived in that house—had gained strength from each other, Louise got back to work. Sara, she told me, was little more than a catatonic shell, having clearly lost hope sooner than Louise, and couldn’t be engaged with to help. And so then, to satiate her rage, Louise returned to her own room and dragged the body of Thomas Hartwell outside.

  “It was early morning, dawn yet to illuminate a deserted wintry landscape, and once Louise had ventured into a barn containing old tools and other farm-related items, she went back outside…carrying only a drum full of petrol and a box of matches. Perhaps it’s unnecessary to explain what happened next.”

  I’d followed this latest part of the story intently and certainly knew what I’d have been tempted to do in similar circumstances. Nevertheless, something else troubled me now, something connected to recent activity on my part I’d yet to disclose to my informant. I gave voice to this at once.

  “Where did she do it? Where did she burn that bastard’s body?”

  The man nodded and simply said it: “Across a few fields away from the house, where two trees grew toward each other, forming an arch.”

  I felt all the air go out of the room, as if a sudden attack of heat had just befallen the property, making everything bend and waver, rendering my vision unstable. This was, of course, what I’d experienced back at the farm in Norwood, when, through one of the building’s rear windows, I’d spotted that figure lurking between trees at a distance, seemingly looking back at me, before vanishing as soon as I’d turned away.

  Had such an entity, undead and barely held together by blackened flesh, possessed a capacity to cross to the house and get inside my unlocked car to leave that suggestive message on my windshield, its inscribing finger little more than charred bone? I’d have to assume so, even though merely asking this question made me worry about my state of mind.

  Recalling that I’d been through almost as much pain during childhood as Dexter had, I wondered whether such experiences could lead to psychological vulnerabilities or perhaps unusual gifts of perception. In short, had I hallucinated those images back in that deserted house, picking up on lingering spiritual residue: a dark magician whose body had been torched with petrol and a match over thirty years ago?

  Addressing these co
ncerns would mean mentioning that I’d visited Norwood prior to arriving here, and for some reason I remained reluctant to do so. But then the journalist spoke again, and I was saved the trouble of concealing this furtive truth.

  “When Louise got back to the house, hoping to enlist help from a partially recovered Sara, she discovered something astonishing.”

  “What did she discover?” I asked, once again enthralled by this gripping tale.

  “Sara—your brother’s mother—was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes, indeed. She was nowhere on the property, and Louise investigated everywhere. She’d been dealing for a full hour with the man who’d tortured them, which had offered her companion plenty of time to flee. I guess Louise was surprised Sara had found enough strength to do so.”

  I floundered, trying to figure out the implications of this latest knowledge. Was that how my dad had picked up only one of the women, intercepting her on his way out to work that early morning? Norwood was on a convenient route for anyone travelling from Dwelham to York, which made this a convincing scenario.

  I glanced back at my informant, hoping he’d add more. But maybe half a minute passed before he spoke again,

  “With the body still smoking at a distance, filling the morning air with its pungent scent, Louise didn’t dare leave the building until she got rid of certain evidence. As she’d already dealt with her abuser in such a punitive fashion, she’d realized that contacting the police was impossible—despite the terrible circumstances, she was now a murderer, after all—and so she spent a lot of time getting rid of any evidence she could locate. She said she didn’t trust police, anyway. She’d heard about cases in which similar victims of abuse had taken the law into their own hands and ended up being imprisoned, even though they’d had moral right on their side.

  “Now feeling less enraged about the situation, having achieved her revenge, Louise said she was fearful that Sara might have different thoughts about getting authorities involved and didn’t want to be drawn into any case. That was why she worked so hard to eliminate any telltale clues. Louise regretted the other woman being absent when she’d returned to their place of torture. She’d wanted to tell her what she’d done to Hartwell, perhaps saving them both from years of torment.

  “Once Louise had burned all their bedding and clothing, scrubbed fingerprints off any surfaces, and finally buried Hartwell’s smoldering bones deep in a nearby field, she rushed along a lane leading up to the farm, where there was no sign of her long-term companion. Then, dressed in garments she’d found in the house—the items in which she’d gone missing, nearly three years earlier—Louise made her way south, back to her native Malton, where she was greeted with astonishment by her reclusive mother, who’d almost given up hope of ever seeing her daughter again.”

  At that moment, I interrupted, because the journalist had just addressed an issue that had occurred to me earlier. “I was going to ask about that, actually,” I said, fingering those drawings on the chair’s arm once more. “How was it possible for two young women to go missing for so long without anyone noticing?”

  “Oh, their disappearance had been documented, and during 1979—the first year of their confinement—there’d been a lengthy hunt for both. But remember, Harry, they’d been locked up in a remote farmhouse way beyond that date. And as nobody had ever spotted either woman, police had moved onto other cases, retaining their ‘missing person’ statuses but investing no further resources into finding them.

  “It happens all the time, my friend—certainly much more than we like to believe. People of all ages regularly vanish. It occurred again only recently: a young woman from Middlesbrough has been missing for several weeks, having last been seen buying milk from a village shop. It’s all tragic but true, especially as this one suffers a minor disability—clubfoot, I’m led to believe.”

  I thought of my wife not returning home from work one day, how scared and angry it would make me feel. I shuddered on the spot, but then, switching my mind to previous matters, I spoke again.

  “So that was the end of it? Neither Louise nor Sara went to the police?” Along with the first woman’s reasons for not doing so, I could also understand why my dad’s ostensible lover hadn’t either: she’d found a way of making considerable money by illegally blackmailing my parents. But something else bothered me about later events, which I explored at once. “Did the two women ever meet again?”

  “Louise says no, and suggests she didn’t have much desire to do so. By this time, she was getting by in various ways, most involving hard substances. It turned out the drugs with which she and Sara had been involuntarily injected had left her with a serious dependency, and she spent the next few years almost constantly intoxicated. Medical confirmation that she was incapable of bearing children hardly reduced her reliance on such desperate survival strategies. Her insides had been horribly mangled, apparently, presumably by an overly rough act on the part of Hartwell.”

  I hesitated for long seconds, sensing that something didn’t ring true here, but then, unable to work out what this related to, I asked, “Did your story ever see print?”

  The man shuffled in his chair, his fifty-plus bulk making its springs squeak. “My editor, who’d given me a green light to investigate and had agreed to a generous fee—it’s no secret what Louise spent this on; that was why she’d come forward with her story, insisting on it remaining anonymous—decided at the eleventh hour to veto publication of my article, almost certainly because of its…well, shall we say, its outlandish nature, as well as the fact that I had so few concrete facts to support it. He got scared, basically, and didn’t want to risk the newspaper’s respectable reputation.”

  “That’s a shame,” I replied, edging closer to the final issue I needed to explore before leaving. “And was that why you decided to publish it online—because you didn’t wish to jeopardize your career?”

  The journalist smiled, perhaps realizing what I’d already guessed at, without understanding I’d acquired the information from that certificate on the wall behind me.

  Then he confessed it all—telling me his real name, the fact that “Greg Church” was a pseudonym, and that he’d considered his story substantial enough to enter the public domain, even if its evidence base was too flimsy to meet the standards of most formal publications.

  I now felt satisfied about this lingering concern, but that was when the man revealed a final twist.

  “About ten years ago, long after I’d tracked Sara to her Scarborough home, and once I’d heard Louise Patterson had died from a drug overdose—the official report claimed it was accidental, but I’ve often wondered about that—I received a package in the post.”

  “A package?” I said with haste, knowing that time was getting on—I’d been in the man’s house for over an hour, surely—and sitting forward in my chair, hands crumpling those drawings with involuntary tautness. “What was it—something related to the farm…to Hartwell…to who?”

  “Let me explain,” Peter-and-not-Greg replied, holding up his hands with an air of drawing his narrative to a close. “It was a video cassette, Harry—one of those which go in an old handheld camcorder, the kind lots of people used in the 1980s.

  “I could only imagine that while clearing up that house after burning to death her torturer, Louise had found this among the man’s possessions and decided, for the purposes of financial gain, to sell it locally. Indeed, the letter that came in the package suggested the owner—who hadn’t specified a name or even contact details, clearly preferring to be anonymous—had found the aging device near Malton during a clear-out of a secondhand shop’s unsold stock, and that when he or she had got it home, they’d found disturbing material on the tape. A brief search of related local activity—there was little or no Internet in those days, but my ‘Greg Church’ pseudonym already existed, reserved for talks I delivered in the northeast—had led them to me.

  “I’m not even going to begin to describe what I saw in th
is footage, Harry. It took me long enough to get hold of suitable equipment to play the thing, because modern camcorders use smaller cassettes. But after I’d eventually located one in a Newcastle store, I wished I hadn’t bothered. It…well, it gave me nightmares for weeks. I didn’t even watch all the recordings—I couldn’t. Certainly not toward the end when…well, when those rapes were supposed to have occurred. It would have been disrespectful, and as it was all now a cold case, I didn’t see the point of putting myself through that, however much of an unflinching professional I’d always considered myself.”

  At last I was roused to comment. “I can understand that, certainly. But…what was on the recordings earlier? Is the tape still available? Can I look?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend anyone did,” he replied, averting his gaze, as if memories of viewing the footage had haunted him for years. Looking back my way, he added, “Do you have family, Harry—a wife and a child, maybe? Or perhaps more than one offspring?”

  “I…I have a wife and a daughter, as it happens,” I replied, feeling defensive.

  But that was when Peter revealed his motivations for asking. “Well, you should reserve making such films for them. Document you all growing older together, the pleasant things video recorders were designed to capture. But not this kind of thing. Oh please, God, not this.”

  The way he’d spoken made me realize that if I pushed hard enough, I’d get my hands on this footage. And after several more minutes of badgering, involving me making it clear how vital it might be for my ongoing investigation, the journalist capitulated, letting his hands drop to his sides.

  “If I’d had this material earlier, who knows? I might even have watched all of it and then reopened the case, taking it to the police to show how the events happened. But…well, what can I say? Although Louise was dead, I had to be mindful of the other—of Sara, your brother’s mother. If she’d found a way of living on after the whole frightful ordeal, what right had I to compromise that? It didn’t seem right, not after so many years.”