The Angler's Tale

by Jack Benton

  ‘Let me go,’ Slim gasped.

  Alan turned back and squatted down. The light caught his face, shadows filling the lines drawn by a lifetime in the sun, and he momentarily looked ancient, a relic of a man God had forgotten to claim.

  ‘Like you would have let us go?’ No longer was he the shy, nervous painter; on his turf Alan McDonald was king. ‘You had every chance. I won’t have anyone soiling her memory. I won’t.’

  ‘Is that what Carson did?’ Slim asked, his breath slowly returning.

  ‘Carson?’

  ‘The radio DJ. The man who died.’

  Alan flapped a hand and turned away. He walked over to a workbench and began tinkering with a series of glass bottles. Slim managed to twist enough to get a view of the other shape which had been on the bed, and it was as horrifying as he remembered before blacking out. At first he had thought it might be Alan’s mother, Corinne, having remained here in death, but now he realised it was far too ancient for that. Bones had worn through the leathery hide in places, and Slim noticed how some patches of skin had been sewn back together, as though Alan was doing his best to maintain the corpse’s condition even as it gradually fell apart.

  ‘Where did you find her?’ he asked. ‘That’s Eliza Turkin, isn’t it?’

  Alan paused, his hands going still. He didn’t turn around, but Terrance rubbed a hand through his hair as though Slim had pushed one button too many.

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut—’

  ‘I didn’t find her,’ Alan said, interrupting Terrance. ‘She found me. She called to me, her arm raised from the water. I had to answer. I had to protect her.’ He turned around, his eyes narrowed. ‘I promised.’

  In his hand he brandished some kind of sponge pad. He crossed the room to Slim and held the rag over Slim’s face. Slim struggled as a noxious smell invaded his senses. He knew what was happening, but bound as he was, there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  His strength faded quickly, his eyes closing.

  When he awakened, he was lying in the bilges of Alan’s boat, wooden slats pressing into his sides, the protruding heads of a couple of loose screws pressing into his back. A small engine was humming, and overhead, sea birds called as they swooped and dived. The smell of salty sea air did nothing to calm Slim’s pounding skull, which felt as though someone had bashed it against a harbour wall. He tried to lift his head to look around, but gave up, lying back and listening to the sound of the river as they motored through the water.

  ‘He’s awake,’ came Terrance’s voice from the bow. Slim craned his neck and caught a glimpse of the fisherman sitting beside an outboard motor. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Good,’ came another voice.

  Slim tried to move his feet, but they were tied tight. The twine had slipped over his socks and now bit at his ankles. He recognised it as the same twine he had seen in the museum, binding stacks of prints. It made sense now; Alan, wanting to catch the sunrise, had been painting on the sandbar beneath the bridge when Carson had shown up with the prostitute.

  ‘You left your string up there, didn’t you?’ Slim said, trying to force some strength into his voice, when all he wanted to do was throw up. ‘You dropped it on the path before you climbed down with your painting gear. You’d moored your boat back along the bank in the trees, where no one would see it, and you’d carried your stuff down to the old bridge. The old man showed up with the prostitute, didn’t he? He picked up your string and started making lewd suggestions. The woman ran off, and you closed in.’

  Slim was still staring up at the sky as he spoke, but suddenly his vision was filled with a shadowed view of Alan McDonald’s face.

  ‘You have so much to say,’ the old painter said. ‘He defiled my grandmother’s resting place with those women.’

  Slim took a few seconds to process the information. So Eliza Turkin was Alan McDonald’s grandmother—the timeline made sense. But—

  ‘Those women? More than one?’

  ‘The older one ran off. I was actually thinking of climbing up and helping him when the younger one showed up. They did dirty things there, disgusting things.’

  ‘Explain to me.’

  ‘I’ll not talk of it.’ Alan growled with frustration, stalking up to the end of the boat, before returning again. ‘When they were done, they argued. His feet were still tied. He slipped.’

  ‘Did she push him?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t see.’

  ‘You could have called the police.’

  ‘Why? The girl ran off. And have myself accused of his murder?’

  Slim lay back in the boat. Eloise had somehow followed Kirsten and Max Carson, and had seen an opportunity to make herself known. It suited what Slim knew of Eloise’s personality for her to have seduced her own father before making the big reveal. And then she had left him.

  The outboard motor slowed. ‘Bring it in slowly,’ Alan told Terrance, as the boat began to turn. ‘The bank is a little farther to the left. We need to put him in deep were he won’t come bobbing back up in a few days.’

  Slim tried to pull up his legs, but realised the twine around his ankles was tied to something else.

  Bricks.

  ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘We can talk about this. I’m not with the police. I don’t need to say anything. I can made evidence disappear—’

  Terrance laughed. ‘So can we,’ he said.

  ‘It was people like you,’ Alan said. ‘Persecutors, conspirators, the lawmen. The ones who decided she wasn’t good enough, that she was a freak. My grandmother never hurt anyone, but they made her suffer, as they’d made her mother suffer before her, as they made everyone associated with her suffer. Like they made the boy here suffer until I took him under my wing. You and your type have always been the enemy of ours.’

  ‘I’m no one’s enemy,’ Slim said.

  ‘You should have kept your nose out and stayed away. Just like that old bastard and his tarts should have stayed away. We don’t want you here, but since you came … we have a place for your type. Lift him, Terrance.’

  Terrance pulled Slim up into a sitting position. He glanced around and realised the boat was floating just off the collapsed railway bridge. On the hill behind it, the empty windows of Eliza Turkin’s old house watched him.

  (watched him—)

  She said she had known he was there, and had followed him. She said she had known his every movement. Was she watching him now?

  As Alan twisted him around, tightening the bonds on his wrists, Slim drew every last ounce of breath into his weakened, aching lungs.

  ‘Marion!’ he screamed with everything he could muster. ‘Marion! Mari—’

  Terrance’s fist collided with the side of his face, knocking the breath out of him. It landed again before Slim could react, and he slumped sideways, crashing back down into the bilges of the boat.

  ‘Hold him still—’

  He felt something cold and hard rub along his wrist, the head of a screw worked loose over time from the boards it secured. Even though it was blunt, Slim hacked his wrists across it, not caring as it cut messily into his flesh. He needed only to loosen the twine a little.

  ‘Hold him still, you idiot—’

  Terrance grabbed Slim’s wrists but blood from the wound had made them slick. His fingers slipped. He stepped forward, trying to regain his hold, making the boat rock. Slim leaned with the momentum and kicked out at Terrance, knocking him backwards. As Terrance stumbled back, making the boat rock even more, Slim jerked his wrists, feeling the bond fray further. Alan reached for him, but Slim lifted an elbow and jerked forward, trapping Alan’s arm between his elbow and body. Alan jerked, but Slim held on, twisting with his other hand, feeling the twine dig deeper into his wrists. Terrance, trying to stand, caused the boat to rock even more. Alan screamed at him to stay still, but too late, Slim’s right arm broke free, blood spattering across the bilges. He spun, clamped his arm around the old painter’s knees, and rolled with the boat’s momentum, kno
cking both Alan and himself over the side.

  The shock of the cold had only just struck him when he remembered the bricks. In a moment he was plunging down, sinking fast, one arm still clamped around Alan McDonald’s legs. The painter was kicking and struggling, but Slim held fast even as he felt muck thicken around his feet, aware that Alan would quickly run out of strength. As small fists pounded at his shoulders, he squeezed his eyes shut and hung on, concentrating only on holding his breath.

  His senses began to darken. In his arms Alan fell still, and Slim felt certain he was no longer moving downwards. He began to dream of his childhood, of days left alone, of loveless birthdays, of his mother’s rages over Christmas cards from his father, of the drink which had always numbed him. Feeling his own strength fading, he let go of Alan and spread his arms, letting the cold numb those parts of him the painter’s body had kept warm, and he thought of days in the Iraqi sun and boots in the sand, of a razor blade, of a letter from an abortion clinic screwed up in the rubbish, of courtroom doors and the end of the world—

  Hands closed over his shoulders and then he was moving. He opened his eyes and his mouth before he could help himself and water came bludgeoning in. He struggled even as someone struggled with him, but while his mind darkened his vision lightened and then he broke the surface, coughing and gasping for air as strong arms pulled him up on to a grassy sandbank.

  ‘Hang in there,’ came a voice from overhead, and Slim looked up, into the rising sun, and saw a woman’s face silhouetted there, and in the absurdity of everything, he began to cough and laugh at the same time.

  62

  Involuntary manslaughter by way of self-defence.

  He might have got off free, had it not been for a series of misdemeanours leading up to Alan McDonald’s death which had soured Slim in the view of the court. Five years, two to be served behind bars, with three suspended. Plus, with good behaviour the judge said he might even be out in a matter of months.

  It was the best he could have hoped for.

  Marion had watched the proceedings, and met him outside as he was led away, allowed a few minutes with his counsel before beginning his sentence. In the weeks he had spent on bail while awaiting his trial, a lot of the pieces had fallen into place.

  In addition to Alan’s body, three others had been recovered after the inlet’s mudbank was painstakingly dredged and searched. Two were ancient, dating back to the 1990s. One was a local man who had gone missing, another a tourist who had vanished without trace.

  The third was Corinne McDonald.

  The remains of all three had been remarkably well preserved in the mud, making identification easy. DNA and dental records had been checked, but according to Marion, the corpses of all three had been nearly identifiable by sight alone.

  A search of Alan McDonald’s home had turned up a further two bodies. The mummified corpse Slim had seen lying on the bed was assumed, in the absence of any possible form of identification, to belong to Eliza Turkin. Later tests revealed traces of the same sediment found in the inlet by her old house, and assumptions were made that her corpse, weighted down in the silt, had come loose after the binding around her ankles rotted, and that the story Alan had told about Eliza hailing him from the water could actually be true.

  Hidden beneath the bed was a final body. The skeletal, decomposing remains of a girl were identified partially by DNA analysis and partly by her half-sister, Lauren Trebuchet. She had died of strangulation, with particles of the same twine used to bind Max Carson’s feet retrieved during forensic examination.

  At his own trial, a tearful Terrance Winters admitted to kidnapping Eloise a couple of weeks after Max Carson’s death on the orders of Alan McDonald, who had remembered her name from her heated final conversation with her estranged father. He claimed the kidnap to have been opportunistic rather than planned, after the girl unexpectedly visited his tackle shop one morning, wanting to purchase high density fishing line using a previously promised discount, the intended use of which was never determined. Later CCTV examination from street cameras across Totnes confirmed the girl’s last movements, but in the absence of her body, she had never been investigated. Terrance also admitted to posting a letter found in the girl’s clothing and addressed to Slim, hoping to deflect suspicion. DNA samples taken from skin oil residue on the letter Kim had saved proved a match. While taking the stand in court, Terrance begged the jury for mercy, claiming to have spent his life beneath his reclusive father’s subtle power. The jury didn’t agree, and he was sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years for aggravated kidnap and conspiracy to murder.

  For a long time, Irene Long’s death remained a forgotten part of the puzzle. Just a week before his trial, Slim received a phone call from Kay.

  ‘Hey, mate, how are you holding up?’

  ‘Been better,’ Slim said, trying not to think about his upcoming trial. ‘Probably been worse too.’

  ‘I mislaid something you sent me. So sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Sure. Anything you have.’

  ‘That list of medication you sent me … I had a contact run it against that autopsy report. You were bang on the money. Her medication was spiked. Irene Long, already dealing with psychosis issues, was inadvertently taking a combination of drugs which would cause heavy delusional periods. This girl Eloise likely poisoned her.’

  Slim nodded. He thought about the death threats he had received, the likely attempt on his life. With most of the players dead, there were things he would never prove, but it appeared that both he and Irene had fallen foul of Eloise’s delusional attempt to divert attention and suspicion from herself. Irene’s bizarre suicide, brought on by the combination of drugs she was taking, and almost certainly Eloise’s influence in a clumsy attempt to incriminate Slim, had drawn off police resources while retargeting the fingers of suspicion.

  The girl must have thought herself a mastermind. Slim gave a wistful smile. He had read in a newspaper article that Eloise was now being posthumously investigated, both in the assault on the publican Jack Hodge and the suicide of her former boss, Leon Davids. Whether anything would come to it, he didn’t know, but while he felt for Lauren, he would never forget how she had seemed when she told him of positively identifying her sister.

  As though Eloise’s death had been a relief.

  ‘You’ll be out before you know it,’ Marion said, pulling Slim into a hug as he stood waiting to be led away to begin his sentence. ‘I know this hasn’t worked out the way you hoped, but … thanks. There’ll be fallout for sure, but the last thing anyone needs to worry about is the damn tourist industry.’

  Slim smiled. ‘They’ll be an extra stop on all those guided tours by this time next year.’

  Marion laughed. ‘I’ll be staying away.’

  ‘A good plan.’

  Marion’s smile faded. ‘Your tipoff checked out, by the way. I don’t know if it would make any difference now, but I wanted you to know you were right.’

  ‘About the car?’

  ‘Like you said, it was the only viable way. Eloise followed Carson that first night on the tour, overheard their plans, and hid inside the car when they headed for Greenway. I had a mate from forensics search the boot, and we came up with hair samples which matched Eloise’s DNA.’

  Slim nodded. ‘She hid under those nets in the back as they drove up there, then got out and followed them. After Kirsten ran off, Carson must have felt like he was dreaming when a young girl came wandering out of the woods.’

  ‘At first.’

  ‘Will any of this come back on Kirsten?’

  Marion shook her head. ‘I had the analysis done off the record. It wouldn’t make any difference to your sentencing, and I think Kirsten was one of the few innocents in all this. For what it’s worth, she told me she’s thinking of changing profession.’

  ‘She should consider starting an aquarium,’ Slim said with a wistful smile. ‘From the look of her place, she w
as halfway there already.’

  Marion smiled. She patted Slim on the arm as though about to say goodbye, then her eyes suddenly widened.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot. I have something for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She put a hand into her pocket and pulled out a battered old Nokia. ‘Yours, I believe?’

  Slim couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Yes. What happened, did it ping off a telephone mast?’

  Marion scoffed. ‘You must be joking. This ancient thing was invented shortly after the wheel. It was found by a dog walker in a creek twenty feet back from the road. The guy handed it in to a local police station and someone must have had an old charger lying around. I guess you … dropped it?’

  Slim shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It was traced back to you but didn’t contain anything useable as evidence. I don’t think it’ll be missed.’ She smiled as she turned it over in her hands. ‘It still works, believe it or not.’

  ‘Those things are indestructible,’ Slim said.

  ‘You can’t take it with you so I’ll have it sent to your home address.’

  Slim smiled again. ‘It will be nice to have an old friend waiting for me.’

  Marion gave a sheepish smile in return. ‘So, have you any idea how you’ll spend your time on the inside? If you keep busy, it’ll fly past.’

  Slim nodded. ‘I’m planning to take a rest,’ he said.

  * * *

  END

  About the Author

  Jack Benton is a pen name of Chris Ward, the critically aclaimed author of the dystopian Tube Riders series, the horror/science fiction Tales of Crow series, and the Endinfinium YA fantasy series, as well as numerous other well-received stand alone novels.