by S M Hardy
I threw back the bedcovers and retrieved our booty. ‘I’m beginning to wish we’d just left these where we found them,’ I grumbled.
Emms gave me one of those looks of hers she’s so good at. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Meaning what?’
She laughed and pushed away from the door to come back and sit on the bed. ‘You accused me of loving mysteries when you’re just as bad. This is all right up your street.’
‘What? People getting murdered and thumped on the head?’
She pulled a face. ‘No – the intrigue. You love all the delving into the unknown and seeking out the truth. Reggie was the same. You can take the man out of Military Intelligence, but you can never take the creeping around, and doing the derring-do out of the man.’
My mouth dropped open. ‘You knew about that?’
She gave me one of those ‘Really?’ looks. ‘Even George down the pub knew. He told Jim you were in Intelligence.’
‘How did he know?’ There was I thinking no one had any inkling about what I’d once been, when even the local publican knew and was discussing it with his patrons.
‘When a man won’t talk about his military career it’s either because he never really had one or he was involved in something to do with national security. As both you and Reggie served together and you were both so very tight-lipped it was obvious you must have been up to something covert. It doesn’t take a genius to work it out.’
‘Reggie said you didn’t know.’
She shrugged. ‘I never told him I did. He was like you, he liked to appear mysterious.’ She sat down on the bed. ‘Come on, then, what’s in the envelope?’
Feeling ever so slightly flabbergasted I tipped the contents onto the bed. There were a further three smaller envelopes and a folded sheet of paper. ‘I don’t like to appear mysterious,’ I muttered.
‘Hmm,’ she said with a smile and picked up the piece of paper, unfolding it. Her eyes jerked to mine. ‘I think they’re pictures of Laura.’ She tapped the top of the page with a fingernail. ‘Look, here’s her name.’ She handed the A4 sheet to me.
She was right. There were eight colour photographs of a dark-haired young woman, who I assumed was Laura, going about her daily life: walking down a street, climbing the steps into an office building, kissing a friend goodbye outside a restaurant. All everyday, normal actions.
‘Someone has been keeping tabs on her by the looks of it.’
‘But why would Edward?’
I turned the page over, studying it. There were two torn punch holes down the left-hand side. ‘Who’s to say Edward had these taken? These are professional surveillance photos and have been torn from a file.’ I moved to sit next to Emma. ‘What’s in the envelopes?’
Emma glanced at her watch. ‘We had better start to get ready for dinner.’
She was right. The envelopes would have to wait until later. I bundled them and the jewellery case together and wondered where the best place would be to hide them. In the end I pulled out the bottom drawer in my bedside cabinet, dropped in the files and replaced the drawer. The jewellery case I hid under the foot of the mattress. The camera, being the least interesting of our treasure trove, I put in the bottom of the wardrobe.
All I had left to do now was to get changed and put on a face that was a whole lot happier than I was feeling.
The photographs didn’t in any way do Laura Simmons, as she was now known, justice. I could tell she would be attractive, but in real life she was more than that. The pictures hadn’t captured her inner spark, which made her, for want of a better word, alluring. She was tall and a bit too skinny for my taste, but had a natural grace about her and was one of those women, a bit like Emma, who could have been wearing a plastic bin bag and would have still looked elegant. Her nose was a little long, her eyes a little too wide apart and her forehead a little too high, but when all put together she was quite captivating and I couldn’t understand for the life of me why she had no boyfriend in tow.
Emma took to her immediately and before we’d finished our first drink she had teased out of her that she was presently single, unemployed and had been about to become homeless, when she had received the letter from Brandon Fredericks telling her she had been left a legacy.
‘I had no idea, until I saw him this afternoon, of the enormity of it all,’ she said. ‘Jenny, my flatmate, said there must be property involved otherwise why make me travel all this way, but this’ – she gave a vague gesture around the room – ‘it’s all too much to take in.’
‘Had you met any of the family?’ Emma asked.
She shook her head, swallowing a mouthful of wine. ‘No. I didn’t know I had any, other than my Auntie June and she passed away six months ago.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Emma said.
‘I still miss her like crazy, I’m just surprised she never told me about my grandfather. She always said we had no other family.’
‘From what we understand there was a falling-out at some time,’ Emma said, ‘but you’d have to ask Simon.’
‘I hope he’ll be all right,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘No sooner than I find out I have family this happens.’
‘He was looking forward to meeting you so much,’ Emma said.
‘Wasn’t he a bit put out that I’d been left the family home?’ she asked, glancing from Emma to me.
Emma gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Not at all.’
I kept quiet. Despite what Simon had told us I had my doubts.
Laura retired to her room early pleading tiredness and we followed on not long after. To be honest, I wanted to take a look at the contents of the envelopes in Edward’s stash.
When we arrived back at the room I was half-expecting them to have disappeared, but they were exactly where I’d left them, as was the jewellery case.
I dropped them onto the bed. ‘Want to take a look?’ I asked.
‘Go on,’ she said.
I picked up one of the unmarked brown A5 envelopes, peeled open the flap and peered inside. Polaroid photographs – who on earth used Polaroid cameras these days? I glanced towards the wardrobe, where I had put the one we’d found; Edward obviously did. He’d been locked away most of his life and it was probably his from when he’d been a child. I emptied the contents out onto the bed and immediately understood. The photos were old, about sixteen years or so, and graphic mementos of a brutally murdered couple taken at the murder scene. Laura’s likeness to the murdered woman was enough for me to surmise the couple were her parents.
Emma got up and walked away. ‘They’re … they’re too awful.’
I agreed, they were. I had seen more than enough death in my time. I had also seen photographs taken as evidence at crime scenes. These photographs had not been taken by a forensic team or even a professional like the pictures of Laura. These had been taken as proof of a job done. I inwardly sighed, this was getting more terrible by the minute.
I made myself study each one. William and Martine Pomeroy hadn’t just been murdered, they had been ritually killed. Martine had been stripped naked and spreadeagled on the floor her wrists and ankles tied to strategically placed heavy armchairs and stabbed through the chest. Whether this was before or after her eyes and tongue had been cut out, I couldn’t tell. I had an awful feeling it was probably after.
The photographs of William were even more harrowing. He had similarly been stripped and spreadeagled across the dining table. He had been sexually mutilated and from the blood splatter I knew he had been alive when they had done it to him. His eye sockets were a bloody mess and his mouth was stretched open in a gory, silent scream. It had been a bloodbath, a bloodbath with a message. The injuries inflicted on the couple had been carried out for a reason.
I shuffled the photos into a pile and slid them back into the envelope. This was a mess. I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. I had been wrong about the people belonging to this mysterious cult. There was more to their group activities than sex – they were truly dangerous peopl
e and Emma and I were slap bang in the middle of it all. And now so was Laura.
There was also something else: these pictures being in Edward’s possession begged the question – who had ordered the murder of his brother’s son and daughter-in-law?
‘So what does all your Military Intelligence training tell you about this?’ Emma asked.
‘Apart from we should get the hell out of here?’
She moved to stand in front of me and stroked my hair back from my face. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’
‘You should go home.’
She grimaced. ‘If I’m in danger here with you, I’ll be in even more danger back at home on my own if this should all get nasty.’
She was right. If they had any inkling about how much we now knew we were in deep shit. I needed to speak to Simon. He had been living here on and off about the time when William had left. If anything strange had been going on he must have realised. Perhaps he had and this had been the real reason why he’d contacted me. He was ill, he was scared, and he was all alone and he needed someone he could trust.
While Emma was in the bathroom getting ready for bed I took a seat, dropping the last two envelopes onto my knees. One was quite bulky and peeping inside I could see several more Polaroid photographs and I wasn’t at all sure I had the stomach for any more of Edward’s nightmarish pictures. The other was flat and it looked as though there were just a couple more sheets of paper inside.
Girding my loins, expecting to see more atrocities, I slid the photos out onto my lap. I couldn’t have been more surprised. These were a different kettle of fish altogether and, if I wasn’t mistaken, taken from the doorway leading into Edward’s en suite bathroom.
A slender, dark-haired woman was taking a shower. Not much more than a hazy figure behind the steamy water-splashed screen, I suspected she was completely unaware she was having her photograph taken. I flicked through the others and they were more of the same, except they weren’t in chronological order as the last picture had been taken before the screen had become too misted. This was the best picture of the woman. I couldn’t see her face. It was angled away from the photographer, her head thrown back and her short black hair plastered to her scalp like a swimming cap, as the water pounded down onto her breasts. I pondered on who she could be before returning them to their envelope.
Inside the last one was a couple of sheets of paper, this time folded into four. Again they were torn along the left-hand edge where they had been ripped from a file. With some trepidation I unfolded them, spreading them out across my knees. It was just as well I was sitting down.
I was beginning to understand why Detective Inspector Brogan had such a rumpled and world-weary appearance. The two pages were full of pictures and once again were professional surveillance photos. These, however, didn’t portray the normal, everyday life of a police officer. They had been taken with one motive in mind, to my way of thinking, blackmail.
Even though printed onto standard computer paper they were of good quality and showed the DI with a woman, and I was pretty sure it was the same one who had been photographed in the shower. Strangely enough, once again, not one of them showed her face. She was tall and slim, although shorter than Brogan. Her hair was slightly longer in these pictures and was more of a shiny black bob. The first couple were of her greeting him with a kiss not intended for family members or mere acquaintances. After those things began to get steamy, and by steamy I mean X-rated. If I had to guess I would say the photographer had somehow managed to get himself a room in an opposite building or maybe had taken the photos from a rooftop. Brogan and his lady friend hadn’t bothered to close the curtains.
Each of the sheets of photos was timed and dated and I had to give it to the bloke, he was up for anything. Some of the pictures taken of him and the unknown woman in the back of his car did make me quite envious of his agility and general dexterity, though I did wonder at his naivety – his relationship with the woman had ‘honey trap’ written all over it. This was something else I knew a lot about. In my previous line of business we had to be aware of the signs. A compromised operative was an unreliable operative. I guessed the same could be said about police officers.
So, where had Edward purloined these photos from? Oliver perhaps? But why would he want a serving, fairly high-ranking policeman in his pocket? And it did beg the question – could DI Brogan be trusted?
‘Anything of interest?’ Emma asked as she strolled out of the bathroom brushing her hair.
‘You could say so.’
‘Want to share?’
I handed her the two sheets of paper and the envelope. ‘I’d be interested to hear what you make of them,’ I said as I made for the bathroom.
When I reappeared Emma was sitting in bed, with glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her forehead creased into a frown as she tilted one of the sheets of photographs at an angle.
‘He’s quite flexible for his age,’ she commented.
‘He’s not very old.’
She looked at me over the top of her glasses. ‘Hmm, I would have thought old enough to know better, but that’s men for you.’ She tapped the envelope. ‘And this woman – she certainly gets around.’
‘Doesn’t she just.’ I flopped down on the bed next to her. ‘So, what do you think Oliver was up to? Assuming it was Oliver who had these photos of Laura taken. It certainly couldn’t have been Edward, not while he was in Goldsmere.’
She shook her head. ‘He was a man with a plan, that’s for sure.’
I agreed. ‘But what was the plan?’
She refolded the sheets of paper and handed them to me. ‘Not sure. He had money, so it can’t have been anything to do with financial gain.’
‘So what is it a man like Oliver would crave other than money?’
Her eyes met mine. ‘Power,’ she said. ‘A man who had everything would hunger for power.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I had a restless night. When I did manage to doze off I had anxiety-fuelled dreams, the sort that turned to smoke as soon as I woke. I couldn’t remember much about them other than I was either rushing about late for somewhere I had to be or I was searching frantically for something I couldn’t find. And all the while I was running or searching I could hear the whisper of chanting voices and the rhythmic thud of feet walking in time.
By the onset of morning, as the grey light of dawn crept underneath the curtains, I’d given up on trying to sleep. Of course, I immediately dropped off and didn’t wake until Emma snuggled against me, nudging me into wakefulness.
I yawned, stretched and wrapped my arms around her. She laid her head on my chest, her hair silky against my chin. I smiled at the ceiling. How I’d captured this woman’s heart I’d no idea. She was so out of my league it wasn’t true. I had loved her from the first moment I’d seen her, the day my best mate introduced her to me as his fiancée. And yet I had been happy for him, truly happy. When he’d become sick it had hurt and when he died … Well, I was bereft. Emma and I were both devastated. I was her friend and we consoled each other as only best friends can. I’d never thought I would be anything else to her. I didn’t dare even countenance it. But here we both were. I kissed the top of her head, her blonde hair tickling my lips.
‘Come on, you lovely man,’ she whispered. ‘We’d better get up. Laura will be waiting and we have to phone the hospital.’
‘You go first,’ I said. ‘I’ll lay here like a gentleman of leisure while you beautify yourself.’
She pulled herself onto her elbow to look at my face. ‘Hmm, perhaps you should go first.’ She pecked me on the cheek and threw back the covers. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘That’ll be a first,’ I murmured, but she was already gone.
I sprawled there feeling happy until the real world began to creep into my thoughts. Damn Simon and his psychotic bloody family. I immediately felt mean. Simon had no more control over his siblings than I did.
Any pleasure I was getting from lying in bed d
oing nothing evaporated and, with a huff, I hauled myself into a sitting position and groped for the dressing gown draped across the bedside chair.
I drew back the curtains and went out onto the balcony. The air was already beginning to warm and the grey mist floating above the lawn and fields would burn away by the time we’d finished breakfast. Instead of the beautiful view bringing me joy I felt deflated. Such a beautiful place, and yet so evil. No, it wasn’t the place, it was the people who had lived here. Or perhaps still did. There had been many robed figures in my vision.
Unsettled I went back inside.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Emma asked Laura, as Maddy arrived with a fresh pot of coffee.
Laura pulled a face. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Did you hear anything strange last night?’
Maddy, who had been pouring me a cup of coffee, flinched slopping hot liquid onto the table, just missing my hand.
‘Careful, girl,’ Mrs Walters snapped.
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ She tugged a cloth out of her apron pocket, dabbing at the spillage. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said directly to me.
‘Don’t worry. No harm done.’
She bobbed into what I swear was a small curtsy, then she was gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Walters said as she checked the table. ‘She’s normally so careful.’
‘It was an accident. No problem.’
‘Well, if that’s all?’ She glanced around the table.
We all murmured our thanks and she was gone.
‘What were you saying about hearing noises last night?’ Emma asked.
‘I heard something strange.’
‘How do you mean strange?’ I asked.
She put down her cup. ‘Here’s the thing – it sounded like chanting and’ – she hesitated, thinking about it – ‘when I went out on the balcony to listen, I thought I saw a glow over in the forest. Like maybe there was a bonfire burning.’