by Luca Veste
Chris winced and tensed up. ‘That’s the problem. I don’t think Nicola is going to be convinced.’
‘Even if Michelle turns up . . . you know? Won’t that be enough?’
He shook his head in response. ‘She seemed pretty adamant that she wanted us to just forget the whole thing and even if someone was coming after us, that it could be dealt with. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I guess she means getting rid of the problem?’
‘Don’t go thinking that hadn’t crossed my mind,’ I replied, feeling the anger come back. I remembered how scared Michelle had been and was suddenly filled with the urge to deal with the issue myself.
Could you really kill again?
The answer came to me quickly and that worried me.
For hurting my friends?
Yes.
Yes, I would.
Thirty-One
‘What do we do now then?’
I looked at the clock in the alcove and saw it was coming up on 8.30 a.m. I didn’t think Chris would want to sit around all day, especially with me, so I got to my feet. ‘Go home, get showered and go to work. I’m sure they’ll let you off with being late for once. We need to make sure we lead as normal a life as possible before we decide to do anything. I don’t have a boss other than myself, so I can do the brunt of it – I’m going to try and find Michelle.’
‘You’re going to need help with that,’ Chris said, straightening up and trying to add an inch or two to his height. It didn’t make any difference.
‘It’s fine. If I find her, or get anywhere near her, I’ll call the police. Let them deal with it. I’ll give you a call later and let you know what’s happening. If I don’t get anywhere, we can arrange a meeting between all four of us. See if we can talk the other two into doing what we think is best.’
Chris rubbed some life into his eyes and stood up. ‘You’re right. Not sure how useful I’ll be, but I haven’t missed work in a long time. They’ll be okay with me being late. I’ll ring them from the car and come up with some sort of excuse. Thanks for . . . well, you know.’
‘No problem. That’s what mates are for.’ I gave him a brief hug at the door and waved him off. Closed the door behind me and went back in the house.
I thought about being the last one.
I didn’t know what order we were being targeted, but for the first time I considered the idea that it could be me who was the only one left at the end.
I wasn’t going to let it get that far.
My phone pinged with a message, just as I was about to shower and try to make a plan. A message from Alexandra.
Just spoke to her mum. Still no sign. Will call soon. x
I wanted to deliberate over the kiss at the end of the message, but I couldn’t think about that then.
I thought about Alexandra being next and that was enough to keep me moving.
A shower is a good place to think, I’ve heard often. I stood under the water, turning the temperature up high. The cubicle steamed up and I closed my eyes, enjoying the heat on my body.
I didn’t think of anything for a few minutes. Allowed my mind to drift and just listen to the muted music trying to blast its noise over the water streaming down. I would have sung along to it, if I had any sort of voice.
Stuart’s face came to me. The way I always remembered it. Early twenties, laughing and joking around. Not a care in the world. Always ready for a good time. Then it morphed into another one I’d seen over the years. The guy on New Year’s Eve in 1999. Another time after that.
The Stuart from the woods.
What if Stuart wasn’t the body on the tracks? What if the reason he was in the woods was because . . .
I stopped myself before I could think any further.
Still, no major breakthroughs. No bright ideas. No clue as to how I was going to find Michelle.
Just, nothing.
Instead, I tried to think of reasons not to call the police and tell them everything straightaway. Tell them what I knew, who it could have been, and hope they found Michelle alive.
The only reason not to was that I would be going against the rest of my so-called friends. We all needed to be in agreement.
That was the pact.
I was drying off when I heard the doorbell ring downstairs. I tried to look out of the window, but couldn’t see who was at the door. I swore quietly to myself and pulled a T-shirt and jogging bottoms on.
The doorbell rang a couple more times and a bang on the door made me shout from the stairs as I came down.
Whoever it was knocked once more before I managed to get the door open.
‘Nicola,’ I said, hearing the surprise in my voice and then tried to stamp it down. ‘Are you okay?’
She didn’t say anything, pushing past me and into the house. I followed her inside, taking the towel I still had around my neck away and leaving it on a radiator in the hall. I found her in the kitchen, leaning on a counter and biting one of her fingernails.
‘You’ve heard?’ I said, stopping at the doorway. She was the only one in the group who hadn’t changed all that much in the years since we’d grown up together. Whenever she was angry about something, it seemed to change the atmosphere around anyone in the vicinity. It used to set me on edge, especially when I was the subject of her impatience. Eventually it became a running joke between us. Not that I spent any time trying to rile her. I reached over and flicked the kettle on. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘No, I don’t want a bloody cup of tea.’
I left it boiling, but switched on the coffee maker instead. ‘Michelle.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, facing her and folding my arms across my chest. ‘But I intend to find out.’
‘Yeah, good luck with that. She’s probably shacked up with some bloke she’s met on Tinder and forgot all about the bullshit that’s going on. A quick lay to get over her dead ex.’
‘Hang on, that’s not fair,’ I began, but Nicola waved me off with a dismissive wave of her hand. I saw her breathing harder, seemingly trying to keep a lid on her anger and about to fail. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here if not because you’re worried about Michelle?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘You’re gonna have to give me a bit more to go on than that.’
Nicola pushed away from the counter and walked towards me. ‘Is this all a game for you? Is that what it is? A way of making us do something stupid and confessing to something we didn’t even really do?’
Whatever I’d been expecting her to say, this definitely wasn’t in the ballpark. ‘I don’t understand . . .’
‘Just because you can’t get on with your life doesn’t mean we all have to live in the past. You might have convinced Michelle that someone had broken into her house, but it won’t work with me.’
It took a second, but it came to me then.
It won’t work with me . . .
My heart started beating harder now. ‘What’s happened, Nicola?’
There must have been something in my expression because she hesitated for a moment before going on the attack again. ‘You know damn well what’s going on. I don’t know what your game is, or what you hope to achieve, but I’m not going to crack on this. We’re not telling anyone about that man dying or about Mark bloody Welsh and his whinging mother on every TV show going. It’s that simple. I’m not giving everything up just because you can’t handle the guilt. It wasn’t just you there that night, we were all there. It’s our decision, not yours, and I won’t be bullied into doing something because of you. No matter what you leave in my house.’
I cocked my head at that, allowing the final puzzle piece to click and turn my blood cold. ‘What was left in your house?’
‘You know damn well . . .’
‘Nicola,’ I said, my voice echoing around the kitchen as I shouted, stopping her in her tracks. Her mouth closed instantly. ‘I haven’t been to your house in a while. I didn’t leave anyth
ing there and I definitely don’t have the first clue why you think I would do something like that. You know me better than that, surely?’
Nicola peered at me, her eyes softening as the anger seemed to subside a little. It wasn’t gone for long. They became mixed with fear, but shone somehow brighter. ‘Are you telling me . . .’
‘It was a candle, wasn’t it?’
She seemed frozen in place; rage barely confined. Staring at me and not blinking.
‘Oh my God,’ I said, moving away and facing the doorway. I shivered, realised I was barefoot in the kitchen – the tiles burning cold underneath my feet. I turned back to her and she hadn’t moved. ‘When did this happen? Does Chris know? He was only here an hour or so ago.’
‘He doesn’t know,’ Nicola replied, her voice quiet but with an edge I didn’t like. ‘I found it after he left early this morning. It was just like the one we saw in those woods – in a storm lantern. It was left on the back step. I wouldn’t have even found it this morning if I hadn’t needed to take the recycling out. Chris is going to freak out when I tell him about this. I didn’t even know he was coming here. We . . . we had a disagreement last night. He wants to go to the police as well. Obviously you were persuasive when you saw him yesterday. I am very much in the not telling a single soul camp.’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter now. Michelle is gone. Stuart was first. Now he’s after you or Chris and I’m not going to let that happen. We need to come up with a plan. We need to find her before it’s too late.’
‘If he’s got her already, then it is too late,’ Nicola said and her voice was firm. Decided. ‘We both know that. I’m not going to the police, Matt. That’s off the table as an option. If I have to stop this guy myself, I will. He’s not going to ruin my life.’
‘There’s not many ways out of this,’ I replied, pulling out a chair from the dining table and sitting down. I turned to face Nicola. ‘We need to think this through carefully. All of us. If something has happened to Michelle as well, then . . . I don’t know.’
‘We can beat whoever this is,’ Nicola said, moving across the kitchen and leaning on the chair opposite mine. ‘I’ve got no doubt about that. We just have to come up with a way of finding out who it is. That’s the first step. If we fail along the way, we always have that back-up idea of getting help, but that’s all it will be. We’ll be asking for help because we can’t see a way out of the problem.’
‘I can do this,’ I said, hoping she believed me more than I believed myself. ‘If I can’t, then we have to go to the police and tell them everything. We’re in too much danger not to. Does that sound okay?’
Nicola didn’t answer, looking at the ceiling and sighing audibly. She dropped her gaze and looked me in the eye.
‘Find him. Find Michelle. Then we can talk about what the next steps will be.’
I nodded in response, and didn’t ask what the next step would entail.
I didn’t need to. I knew what she meant by it.
Thirty-Two
Nicola left me and I tried to eat something, before abandoning the endeavour when it became clear I was feeling too nauseated. There was a battle going on inside my head – one side wanting me to ignore what was happening and go back to work, another wanting something else entirely.
I got dressed when it became clear that the latter side was always going to win.
I’d already left her alone once. I couldn’t do it again.
My phone was still blank with no notifications, no word from Alexandra or returned call from Michelle. I tried calling her again, but the answer machine kicked in before it even rang, for the umpteenth time that morning.
There were ways of finding the whereabouts of where a phone was last switched on, but I didn’t have the resources for that. I imagined once the police took Michelle’s mum’s worries seriously, that would be checked out first. Or they might find her body in the meantime. It hadn’t been too long before Stuart had been found.
It was thinking about Stuart that led me to pause. If this was connected to the Candle Man – someone who had killed for years without discovery – it didn’t really make sense that he allowed Stuart’s body to be found. None of the Candle Man’s victims were ever discovered. That was why his identity was both so easily dismissed and argued for in equal measure.
It would mean this new killer was someone who saw no reason to abide by the original’s rules.
The computer was on before I was sitting at my desk, and I went back to research, looking at the same message boards and online threads. I was looking for something I couldn’t explain, but I knew it was there. I just had to find it.
An email from Peter stared at me from the new inbox I had created the night before. I tried reading the various posts on the web, but once I’d read the same sentence three times, I knew I had to read the email. I could no longer ignore it.
I had to accept that I suspected Peter was connected to all of this. Putting a face to his messages – spending time in his company – made the whole thing more real. I wasn’t happy with that.
I clicked on the email and read.
Dave,
Good to meet up with you last night. Hope I gave you some good stuff for your article. I’ll keep trying to find out more for you – would be good if I could be known for identifying the Candle Man! That would be some newspaper piece you’d have on your hands. You didn’t mention what publication it was for . . . I’ve had a look online and can’t really find your name as a byline on any stuff. May have got it down wrong though. You know how it is.
All the best and see you soon!
Peter
I wanted to delete the message instantly, but managed to control my urge. I wondered if the Google search on the fake name I’d given him had really been done after we had met. Or whether he had known throughout that meeting that I was lying.
Of course, if he was connected to what was happening to our group now, he would have known I was lying all along.
For what reason? Why would he meet you?
The only answer I could think of was that he was trying to find out how much I knew. I decided to start making notes, hoping it would help clear the fog that was forming in my head the longer I sat there. When I was finished, there wasn’t much that made any sense at all.
The places Peter had mentioned stood out. Bowland Forest, which was north; Shropshire, Brock Hope and the Cotswolds, all south.
Brock Hope was the obvious place that stood out to me personally.
The music festival we had visited the year before had been where this all began for us. I looked on Google Maps after I spent a minute or so trying to remember the journey down there. All that came to mind was singing songs from our childhood and laughing.
The last time I’d properly laughed was probably that weekend. It wasn’t until the thought struck me that I realised how I had taken that for granted in life. Now, everything was just a little more grey.
I searched for Brock Hope and missing people. Every item was regarding the lad who had vanished from the music festival. Mark Welsh. Eighteen years old, disappeared only two weeks before his nineteenth birthday. I punished myself looking and reading through the old articles, learning nothing about the lad that I didn’t already know. I remembered doing this same thing a year earlier and the way it made me feel then. If anything, it had only become worse since.
The picture of his mother, holding his photograph, probably sitting on the sofa of her living room. I pictured her now – sitting in a quiet house, waiting for the phone to ring or a knock at the door. Knowing that it had been too long and that even though she could never be totally sure, there was no real chance of him being alive.
I ignored the stab of guilt.
The knowledge.
I tried to find other missing people in the area, but didn’t get much joy. I imagined Alexandra had the same problem when she was looking into this aspect of it. The Mark Welsh story had overtaken anything else in the area – the salacious rumours a
bout drug taking, the fact that he was incredibly photogenic, the story of his wholesome family background and plans for university.
He shouldn’t have been in those woods that night.
There was a thought, sudden and stark in my head.
If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be in this position now.
It’s his fault.
That did not make me feel good. I shook the thought away – it wasn’t his fault that he’d crossed paths with a serial killer. It wasn’t his fault that we had disturbed the murderer and weren’t in time to save him.
I wondered about Stuart meeting the man I’d met from the internet forum. What the reason for that could be. Same as mine, maybe? As simple as that?
Did he want to know how much information was out there? Real information?
The cursor key in the search box blinked at me accusingly and I began to type.
Faking your own death
Far too many search results.
Identifying a body when found on train tracks
Not many results that didn’t concern actual cases on that one. Someone identified by a fingerprint. Most just reporting that they had been named or next of kin had been informed. I kept on until I remembered the tattoo of Stuart’s.
That’s how Stephanie said he’d been identified.
How easy is it to tattoo
I was going crazy. Stuart was dead. Occam’s razor, I thought. I was looking for something that was never going to show itself.
I was in the denial stage of grief. That was all.
Missing Dead Brock Hope
I went through pages of Google search results. I narrowed the terms and tried to shorten the dates. Then I found something.
Months after Mark Welsh had dominated the news in that area, it was there.
The story was short on detail and I couldn’t find any follow up to it. Simply a local newspaper story that didn’t even seem to be a lead news item. A single mention and then it was gone.