by Luca Veste
Nicola nodded next to him, but I wasn’t sure she was too happy about the idea. She was tense, I could see. A ball of anger and fear rolled into one.
‘I’ll do the same,’ Alexandra said, taking her hand away from my shoulder and standing up. ‘I’m sure they can handle things without me for a couple of days. I’m probably safe at home for now, but I want to be ready at a moment’s notice.’
I looked up at her, trying to work out exactly what she would be ready for, but decided to stay quiet.
We were delusional. All of us.
‘That’s settled the immediate response for now,’ Chris continued, getting to his feet as Nicola did the same. He tried to put a hand on her back, but she was already moving out of the room. ‘We can work out what we do next later.’
I walked them to the door, aware of Alexandra standing behind me. If I tried hard enough, I could imagine for a few seconds that we were back to normal – showing our friends out of our house. Ready to carry on our lives in the way we’d always imagined.
Chris hugged me as he left, but Nicola was already out and near the car.
‘I’ll make sure she’s okay about it,’ Chris said quietly in my ear, grimacing towards me when we broke apart.
I nodded in response, then left the door open and turned towards Alexandra. ‘You could stay, if you like? Get something to eat or talk . . .’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
There was a pause as I tried to find the right words. ‘You should stay here,’ I said eventually, deciding my need to make sure she was okay was enough to override any thoughts of awkwardness. ‘Neither of us should be on our own right now. There’s security in pairs, right?’
She didn’t say anything, but I could see her weighing up the idea and trying to decide what was best.
‘Honestly, I’m not suggesting anything else,’ I continued, moving closer to her now. ‘I just think we need to think practically here. We’re in danger. If we could look out for each other . . .’
‘Matt, I can’t stay here,’ Alexandra said, stopping me in my tracks. ‘You know I can’t. We’ll be okay. There’s a way out of this. We just have to work it out, just like any other problem. Everything has a solution.’
I wanted so hard to believe her, but I couldn’t make myself accept it. As I watched her leave, I came to the conclusion that had been on the periphery of my mind all week.
The only way this was going to end was with more death.
Thirty-Six
Once everyone had left, I put some music on and finally ate a proper meal. I ignored the protestations from my body and forced it down, knowing I wasn’t going to last much longer if I didn’t. The lack of sleep, of food, of normality, was all coalescing to make everything around me seem a little blurred and distorted.
The partially completed map I had started since speaking to Alexandra a couple of days earlier – was it really that short a time? – was on my desk. I liked order. Enjoyed it. My thoughts may have been running around in a dark room, crashing into unseen objects and fading away, but words and markers on a computer screen made things easier.
I knew there was something that would make everything come together for me. A part of the story I wasn’t seeing. There was suspicion inside me, which was gnawing away at my insides, pleading to be noticed.
A significant portion of me was refusing to see and question what had been nagging me for over a week now. I let it wander and aired the thoughts for the first time.
The son.
The father.
That night in the woods.
Stuart.
There was a phone call I knew I had to make, but it needed to be done in the right way. I tried Michelle again first. Same result as it had been all day. Instantly to voicemail. I called her mother, but she only told me there was no word and rushed me off the phone. I imagined receiving a message in the coming hours or days, just like we had after Stuart’s body had been found.
If I couldn’t find her first.
And, with every passing second of not telling the police, I was giving her less and less of a chance of being okay.
That brought me back to the phone call I needed to make. I breathed in deeply, scrolled through my phone and found the number. She answered just before I expected another voicemail to kick in.
‘Hello,’ Stephanie said, the grief still so present in her voice. Her brother may have been our friend for the best part of two decades, but he was her family.
‘Hi, Stephanie,’ I replied, hearing the strain in my own voice. I cleared my throat and continued. ‘How are things with you and the family?’
‘You know. Pretty much the same.’
I thought for a moment, then remembered something I’d read in a book once. ‘I don’t want to tell you the same platitudes you’ll have heard non-stop for the past couple of weeks, but there is something I’ve been thinking about. Grief doesn’t go away. It’ll be with all of us, always, that’s how it works. We’ll never get over what happened to Stuart. We’ll just learn to live with it somehow. How long that takes, I don’t know, but it will happen. That’s what he’d have wanted. He’d never want to be forgotten, but he’d want us to carry on.’
There was silence on the phone, then I heard a sound that made me close my eyes and pray I could keep it together. A sob, choked off. The room had become darker, until all I could see was the glow from the screen and my own hand against my face.
‘Thank you,’ Stephanie said, a few more seconds passing before she spoke again. ‘He knows anyway. He could never be forgotten.’
‘He was a good guy,’ I replied, then engaged in some small talk with her. Asking about the family, seeing how they were all dealing with the shock of Stuart’s death. All the while trying to find a way to obtain information, for which I had no reason to ask. Stephanie seemed to relax the longer we talked, which only served to make me feel worse about what I was starting to think about her brother.
‘I just wish I could have seen him one last time,’ Stephanie said, a sniff cutting off the last word.
This was what I wanted to know. The dread of fear in the pit of my stomach. The thoughts I wanted to ignore.
I just wanted to know why Stuart had been in the woods that night. Why he had gone to see the man who called himself Peter, to learn more about a serial killer called the Candle Man.
I needed to know it was just an overactive mind and lack of sleep.
‘Any time I think about it . . . well, let’s just say I can’t,’ I said, choosing every word as carefully as I could. I was on the thinnest of thin ice. ‘I can’t imagine what that was like for your family. I only know what I’ve read in the paper and that was enough.’
‘It was . . . it was something that no one should ever have to go through. I just don’t know what he was thinking. We couldn’t even see him properly one last time. There was just . . . we saw a photograph. That was it.’
I gritted my teeth at the words. I wanted to feel pain. The idea that I was now complicit in making Stephanie feel these things again. To picture it.
I just had to know.
‘His tattoo, that was it?’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. ‘I just wish there was something more that would tell us what was going on in his head.’
‘I know,’ Stephanie replied and her voice had changed a little. The image of her in my head changed a little in the darkness – the tears subsiding and her forehead creasing into a frown. ‘A photo of his tattoo and that’s all we could see. There was talk of doing DNA or something, but apparently with his ID, that photo, other . . . things, that was enough. And not a single note to tell us why. No last text, or WhatsApp, or email. Nothing.’
I thought about the tattoo. How easily that could be placed on someone else’s body, if you were trying to pass off something destroyed as another.
What the hell are you thinking?
‘I know, I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it all,’ I said, but I could feel the con
versation slipping away from me. ‘I’d known him for almost twenty years. I guess that it’s something we’ll have to live with – that we’ll never know why he didn’t reach out to any of us.’
‘I get it, believe me,’ Stephanie replied, her voice softening again. There was a low voice in the background that said something that was unintelligible. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go, but feel free to call any time. It would be nice to keep in touch with his friends. As I’ve said, he spoke about you all a lot. He didn’t really find his way in life until he found you and the rest at university. He was a bit lost as a teenager. Was always in a mood, didn’t have any friends really. Yet, with you all, he seemed to find his way. You should take comfort from that.’
I found I couldn’t answer properly, so I managed to croak out an acceptance and then ended the call. Sat back in my chair and placed my hands over my face, trying to work out exactly what I was thinking.
It wasn’t such a stretch to think that Stuart was just interested in finding out more about the man we had killed. The truth behind the Candle Man moniker. To an extent, we had all gone down separate paths over the past year, so it made sense that he wouldn’t have told us what he was doing.
It seemed like the finality of the way Stuart had died was starting to make me feel uneasy. The thought of being identified by a tattoo – something that could easily be faked.
Perhaps I was simply still in the denial phase of grief. Yet Stuart’s body had been identified by something that could be constructed if you needed to disappear.
I was grasping at straws, but was it so out of the realms of possibility that there was a chance they were both still alive?
There was really no hope of that, but with everything that had happened over the past year, I could almost make myself believe it.
The man from the online forum. Peter. Someone who had seen Stuart in his final days. That’s who I needed to find.
It came to me five minutes later.
I opened up his last email and found the IP address that had been used to send it to me. Then I opened a new browser on my computer – one I tried to avoid using if possible – and began searching for someone.
Illegal searches weren’t something I did often. Never, actually, despite it being part of the internet of which I was aware. The IP address narrowed down the search area, but once I saw the name, I knew I’d found him.
It took me longer than I’d wanted it to, but eventually I managed to get the info I needed. I was taking a risk, but I thought the element of surprise might work in my favour.
The idea that anyone could be found if you looked hard enough scared me.
Ribchester was a place name that would have made me giggle in normal circumstances. That’s what I had been known for in our group – a childish sense of humour. I would be the single person laughing at a terrible joke in any given situation.
It was a fifty-minute drive and despite the driving I’d already done that day, I decided I had to do it now, otherwise I might talk myself out of it by the morning.
It was almost 10 p.m. when I pulled up outside a semi-detached house my satnav led me to.
An IP address from an email. Land registry records and some other information that was illegal to have access to. That’s all it took.
It was further north than Liverpool, on the edge of Preston. If I’d travelled any longer on the road, I’d have ended up in the forest the town bordered.
In a ten-mile radius of this town, four people had been reported missing.
I switched off the car engine, silenced the music blaring from my phone, and unplugged the USB charger from it. I didn’t make a habit of going to strangers’ houses at night – couldn’t remember a time when I had done it, to be fair – and wondered if I should have taken more precautions. After I’d closed the door softly behind me, I stopped outside my car and looked at the house. At the street. At the surroundings.
It looked normal enough.
Still, that’s how bad things can happen: underestimating the threat of places that seem normal before turning into the opposite.
‘You really need to get some sleep,’ I whispered to myself, as my thoughts began to make even less sense than normal. I swiped a hand through my hair and at the last second, texted Chris with the address I was standing at, told him to save it for me. If anything happened, at least he could point them to there.
I breathed quickly and deeply once, then opened the gate at the end of the path. The squeak it made on its hinges was loud enough to make me jump a little. I let it swing closed behind me and made my way up a well-kept flagstone path. There was running water coming from nearby and I realised it was a fountain on the front lawn, surrounded by stones.
Not what I had been expecting at all.
I breathed again, then knocked softly on the door. It felt wrong to ring the doorbell at that time of night, as if I were intruding in his life somehow if I was wrong about him. There was no answer for a good few seconds, but as I raised my hand to knock again, I heard movement behind the door. The sound of keys being sorted through and then being put in the door before it opened up.
‘Dave?’ the man behind the door said, holding onto the door between us. He didn’t look as shocked as I’d expected, but was perhaps hiding it well. ‘How did you . . .’
‘I need to talk to you.’
Thirty-Seven
I thrust my hands in my pockets, so he couldn’t see that they were shaking. I couldn’t hide the sweat on my forehead or my pale pallor though. I just hoped he wouldn’t notice. Then again, if he was who I suspected, he would probably be able to recognise it in an instant. Looking for any weakness to exploit. I was waiting for him to turn in an instant – to become the man I believed him to be. Still, there was a part of me that wanted him to. To show himself.
If he was the Candle Man’s son, I wanted to see it.
I knew his name wasn’t Peter, but I was sure he also knew my name wasn’t Dave either. I decided to let him have the veneer of anonymity a little longer.
‘Of course,’ Peter said, and opened the door further for me.
I moved inside, the heat from within the house hitting me in the face like a blast of steam. I hadn’t realised how cold it was outside and quickly undid my jacket. I was unarmed, I realised. I had gone there with nothing with which to protect myself.
I really wasn’t cut out for this.
‘Just through on the left,’ the man said, moving behind me. ‘It’s only me in tonight – my wife is out at her club until eleven. I’ll have to go pick her up then, so I’m afraid I haven’t got much time.’
‘That’s okay,’ I replied, wondering how long he’d let me stay for anyway. How long he’d pretend his wife was ever coming back. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’
He followed me, sitting down on a floral-patterned sofa that was out of sync with the rest of the more modern living room. I stood near the mantelpiece, casting a quick glance at the array of family photos that not only littered it, but also the walls of the room.
‘You’re not his son.’
Peter couldn’t have looked more confused if he’d tried. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. Just something we were trying to ascertain for the, erm, story,’ I said, hesitating over my reply. I could see from my response that he no longer believed me anyway. ‘Who are you really?’
He peered at me for what seemed an eternity, but was more like a few seconds. ‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘You’re all over everything I read about the Candle Man. Your username, or derivatives of it, seems to be on all things I can find online. Why are you so interested in him?’
Peter didn’t respond, but instead got to his feet and crossed the room. He came towards me and I tensed up in response, but he reached past me and took a photograph from the mantelpiece.
A photograph of a teenage boy I’d seen in very different circumstances.
‘This is my son,’ he said, showing me the picture and then turning it bac
k round to look at it anew. ‘His name is Mark. He was nineteen years old the last time I saw him. He would have turned twenty a few months ago. The twelfth of August. A year I’ve had to sit here and wait for him to walk back through that door. We both know it’s not going to happen, but it’s as they say – it’s the hope that kills you. How many people go missing every year?’
‘Quarter of a million, like we talked about last time.’
‘He’s one of the ones that didn’t come back.’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked, but I knew the answer already. In every news item, every This Morning appearance, every social media post, there was one person missing other than Mark Welsh.
His father.
‘You’re Mark Welsh’s father,’ I said, realising I’d made a mistake. ‘Why don’t you say that on the forums?’
‘I’d get bombarded with messages,’ he replied, nervously fiddling with a frayed thread on the arm of the sofa. ‘I’d get accused of all kinds. It made sense to stay anonymous. Have you seen some of the things they say about me on there? I wouldn’t get anywhere if people knew who I really was.’
I had seen a few mentions of Mark’s father and none of them were kind. I remembered seeing his name now. Buried in a news item on Mark Welsh. Only his first name – Geoff. He had never met a journalist, it seemed, until I had come along and pretended to be one.
And Stuart, of course.
‘You know about Mark, of course,’ Geoff said, placing the photograph back on the mantelpiece. He walked over to the sofa and sat down with a sigh. ‘His mum told the police and the media I hadn’t seen him for more than ten years. None of the kids. Didn’t even know where they lived.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yeah, sadly.’
‘So she didn’t want you involved in any of the media stuff?’
‘Not at all. I didn’t have the right, apparently. I’d walked out when they were younger and didn’t know them anymore. Even that photograph is one I’ve printed from the internet since. All of them are. I tried talking to the police, but they took her side, so it didn’t leave me with much else to do. When they made sure I had nothing to do with his disappearance, I was just a nuisance to them. They were useless anyway. I know what they think. That he’s just buggered off with some girl or decided to go abroad to work. Like that’s the case.’