“We don’t know that. It’s a wood, a great place to dump a body if you don’t want it to be found for ages!”
“Given it some thought, have you?”
“Oh shut up, D! If he gets arrested he will tell the police about me and I will be in prison, too!”
A little part of her wanted to say that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but her priority was Lula. Lula would fall apart if she ever found out. And if she was being honest, she wasn’t sure how she would survive herself without the love Jackson provided her with.
So, she gave in and let him back into her bed, back into her body. She knew she would only ever be able to resist him if she was not around him, and she would have to wait until summer before she could get away from him.
She refused to go back to the woods, instead using the quietest parts of the cemetery when they needed an outdoor venue. She swore to him that no matter what, she would never set foot in those woods again.
Mr Goldman kept as low a profile as ever, moving unnoticed through the changed world, but Dakota often saw his curtains flicker when she passed by his house, and she could feel him there, beyond his yellowing net curtains, baring a semi-toothless grin at her discomfort, wishing he could pass a remark at the fact she had put curtains up in her bedroom.
The murder of Michelle Taybury was now old news. It always featured in the local paper, but no longer on the front page. It had shocked the village, and posters of the smiling little girl still hung fading in shop windows asking for any help people could give about her last movements the day she died. Nobody saw her again when she entered an alleyway down the road from her house. Nobody saw her journey from there to the woods which lay a mile away. It was as though she had become a ghost the moment she entered that alleyway in the fading light, a ghost passing into fog.
When her body was found, the streets all around the woods became a mass of police cars and white tents. Police men and women knocked on every door including her own, asking questions and showing a recent photo of Michelle in hopes of jogging the memories of any possible witnesses. When asked if she had seen her, she lied under Jackson’s staring eyes. When he asked her later if it was hard to lie, she replied, “I’m used to it.”
The fine toothcomb search of the woods led to the discovery of the remains of six other bodies, all of which were so decomposed they were unidentifiable. All the police could say was they were all young girls aged from ten to fourteen years old. Eventually they would be identified by their dental records.
The village became a hotbed of media activity, press people harassing locals for information and the face of Michelle Taybury appearing everywhere like a vengeful spirit reminding Dakota of the choice she had made.
The killer had been dubbed two names, depending on what paper you read: The Pan’s Wood Murderer or the Babes in the Wood Killer. But the police had no evidence of the killer and no leads, and eventually a known nutter from the next town turned himself in for her murder and the Police seemed satisfied with his confession. Jackson muttered about how the police were desperate to pin the murder on someone and would have charged Mickey Mouse if he had been in the area at the time.
Dakota went to the local library to use the Internet and looked up ‘The Babes in the Woods Killer’ to try and read up more about the case. She had read everything the local papers had to say and had watched every news bulletin. She had even been caught reading the national newspapers by Lula who thought it was odd that she was suddenly interested in reading newspapers. Dakota knew the best way to find out about how the case was going was to look it up on the Internet.
During her research, she came across several other murders that had been dubbed ‘The Babes in The Wood Murders.’ The first was one in Brighton, thirteen years ago, where two little girls were found murdered, the case was unsolved. And there were four more dating back as far as the early 1800’s. All involved the murders of small girls whose bodies were found in wooded areas. Something clicked in Dakota’s mind as she realised that Goldman had moved in next door twelve years previously, and her mother had said he had moved up from the coast. Was it possible that Goldman had done this before?
Back in the Library, Dakota snapped back into herself. The possibility that Goldman had murdered before was interesting to her, as was the possibility that he had committed similar crimes in previous lives. Could he be that bad, through and through, as to have been a murderer in all his lives?
Making her brief explanation to Betty, she dashed off in search of the life of James Goldman wherever it lay on its shelf in the shadowed room. She finally found it after having to flick through the lives of several other James Goldmans; she recognised him from a single page – the pages she opened it on, the page where he strangled a small blonde-haired girl in the woods. She didn’t want to read anymore; she just wanted his name from his previous life, and when he had been born as James Goldman. It appeared he was younger than she thought having been born in 1953; he looked about sixty years old, but could only be in his early fifties. The name he went by in his previous incarnation was Alexander Autaud.
By flicking through Alexander’s book, and reading pieces here and there, she was able to ascertain that he was a French Canadian, living in Vancouver in the early part of the twentieth century, born in 1925. She passed over much of his life, his basically non-eventful life, until she reached the year she was looking for: 1953. During her research on the Internet she had read about the unsolved murder of two children in Vancouver in 1953. It appeared that Alexander Autaud was the perpetrator, but as coincidence would have it, he was hit by a bus just days after he had committed his first murder.
Returning to the book entitled James Goldman, she began flicking through his life, half-annoyed that she wasn’t allowed to pick and choose whatever pages she wanted to read in her own book.
James Goldman had killed for the first time when he was just nine years old.
It turned out that he had taken a shine to a girl of his age and wanted to play with her on his own. He tricked her into joining him on a trip to the local woods by telling her that he had discovered a family of foxes. The young girl’s love of animals was to be the end of her.
Not long after they had entered the woods, little James Goldman told her he wanted her to take her dress off. When she refused, he strangled her and pushed her into a brook where she was found a week later. He was never a suspect and was never caught, and this was what made him realise he could do it again.
Dakota closed the book, a nausea rising in her dead stomach.
She had a hunch that if she searched back through each of this man’s previous lives, she would find the murderer in a string of unsolved child murders that spanned across centuries.
Something that Ariel had said sat up in her head. Something about children committing murders because they had been murderers in their previous lives. Could it be that simple? That there were only a certain number of killers in the universe but that they just kept coming back? The Babes in the Woods Murders were repeatedly given that label because of their similarities with other murders. There was no copycat at work here; it was just the same every time, because the same person was committing them, the same soul returning time after time.
In some ways it seemed hard to believe, and in other ways it seemed the most logical explanation. Centuries of serial murders, and perhaps there were only a handful of souls responsible for the likes of Ted Bundy and Dennis Nilson. Perhaps it was something so deep in those souls that it could never be escaped, something as deep as her love for Jackson. It was all they knew how to do, and there was no cure for it.
Dakota returned to her own life, and waved her hand at Betty’s questions. She didn’t want to talk about it, nor even think about it. All the poor little girls that had been murdered throughout time, their souls passing on to a better life, while their murderer kept coming back to do it again, somewhere else in the world, over and over again, stealing lives and innocence. It seemed like innocence was some
thing James Goldman never had, something he wasn’t even born with.
Even though the guilt was tearing her apart inside, Dakota threw herself into her studies and grew more and more confident that she could pass her exams.
As soon as they were over and the waiting for results began, Dakota began to plan in her head how she would tell Lula that she wanted to go to Ireland and get a job for a while. And then, after a while over in Ireland when she was settled, she would tell Lula she wasn’t coming back and she would be free of Jackson.
It was late June when she finally got a chance to be alone with Lula and tell her of her plans.
“What? You want to move to Ireland?” Lula turned away from the dirty dishes in the sink.
“Well, just for a while so I could get a job and stuff, you know, spend some time with the family.”
“Bollocks, D, you hate most of the family. Besides, you haven’t even been to college yet! I’d understand if you wanted a year out before university, but you need to take your ‘A’ levels before that.” The despair in Lula’s voice was clear as the glasses she had just washed.
“But I thought I could skip all that, get a job instead.”
“No, you can’t do that, D. I am sorry but no.” Lula turned back to her washing up and began scrubbing a plate so hard Dakota thought she might bore through the glaze.
“Why not? I don’t want to do all that!”
“D, Mum and Dad wanted you to go to university. You’re clever and you shouldn’t waste yourself. You’ll end up like me, working in a shop for your whole life. You are worth more. They knew you would be a success.” She spoke, not turning back to look at her sister, but with a determined edge to her voice. She wasn’t going to back down.
“Mum and Dad didn’t care what I did. You are making that up,” Dakota snapped like a spoilt child.
“Really? So why did they leave money to you and stipulate it was to be used for you to go to university?” Lula turned, one hand on her hip, soap suds trailing down her leg.
Dakota fell silent, staring at her sister. How could she not follow what her parents wanted? Or what Lula wanted? After all she had done to Lula, she felt she owed her something – not that going to college would make up for any of it, but it would keep her happy.
“Well, can I go after my ‘A’ levels?”
“Yes, of course. Loads of people take a year out to travel; it would do you good. But I know Mum and Dad wanted you to get a chance to be properly educated. I blew all their hopes for that while they were still here. Please say you won’t let them down, too?”
Dakota felt that one more piece of pressure would make her snap, but she nodded dumbly, enjoying for a moment the broad smile that spread across Lula’s face.
Dakota felt utterly deflated when she returned to her bedroom. All her plans that she had laid out in her head were shot to pieces; she would have to stay for another two years while she took her ‘A’ levels. Two more years of Jackson and lying, two more years of Goldman next door to her watching and listening to her every move. Two more years of forcing strength into her body to go out and act like life was normal and happy.
Suddenly, her heart seemed to stop. The thought of making it through another week with all the secrets she had to bear seemed suddenly impossible. The ghost of Michelle Taybury everywhere she went, the spectre of Goldman beyond his yellow net curtains and the late-night hauntings of Jackson, the tortuous guilt she felt for needing him and not being able to resist him over and over again. She was suddenly distraught, air left her lungs and she began to gasp as she pulled herself along the passage to her bedroom. She wanted to scream, smash windows, run away to where there was nobody and nothing. Her panic attack caused her to faint just as she closed her bedroom door behind her.
When she came to, the horror of her mind capsized. She had to get out; she couldn’t spend one more day in that house with all those lies wriggling around in her brain. In a split second, she made the decision to run away, and it all made sense. She got her hold-all down from the top of her wardrobe and calmly began packing away her most worn clothes. She made sure she packed jumpers, even though it was summer; she knew she would be cold at night most probably lying down on park benches, so she packed her waterproof jacket as well. As soon as Lula had settled in front of the TV, she would go downstairs and take as much food from the cupboards as she could before anyone noticed. Then, as soon as Lula had dozed off or gone to bed she would creep down the drainpipe by her window and head off before Jackson began to make his way to her room.
Sometimes in the summer, Jackson would tell Dakota to sneak out of the window and meet him down the road so they could go to the woods and make love. He liked being outdoors on summer nights and she did, too, but they hadn’t been back to the woods since that night with Goldman. She never wanted to enter those woods again; she didn’t even want to pass by them. She hoped after that night that she would never have to do so again.
She spent the remaining hours writing in her diary, pouring out all her feelings and fears, and the absolute certainty she had that another night in that house would surely kill her.
As the sun began to get lower in the sky, she put her diary into her bag along with her pen and finally, the picture of her mother and father she had laid flat on its front every night for the last five years. The sixth anniversary of their death was a week away, as was her seventeenth birthday. She felt sad that she would not be able to visit her parents’ grave on their day, but she had a feeling they would be with her wherever she went.
It was an achingly beautiful summer evening; the sky so clear and blue, darkening slowly but its edges still so bright, the trees still swaying gently in the warm breeze. She knew the pavement would still be warm and the grass would be cool in the garden. On nights like this, she would lie on the lawn waiting for stars to arrive, bright and promising only the dark. She would breathe in the cooling summer air and dream of warm beaches and palm trees somewhere a thousand miles away, perhaps in California.
The tarmac on the roads would still be humming with traffic long gone and swallows would be chirping through the impossible skies.
It was some time after eleven o’clock when she slid soundlessly down the drainpipe, leaving a short note of apology to Lula, not mentioning Jackson’s name once, but knew he would notice she had taken the photo of herself, Lula and Jackson that had stood out on the landing by the top of the stairs. As much as she hated him, she couldn’t help loving him. Knowing she could never live with him, she knew now she would have to learn to live without him. He had been her demon-lover, the man she was most afraid of, the man she loved more than anything in the world.
She headed off on foot towards the main road; she knew if she followed it, she would get to the next village within an hour and then she could go on from there. She wasn’t entirely sure where she would end up, but knew that she could not get any money until the bank opened the following day, so with her account passbook and ten pounds in cash, she set off to nowhere.
She stopped by the grave briefly to leave some flowers she had stolen from a garden, and carried on past the woods, saying a silent farewell to her parents and her brothers and sisters. Passing by the woods that night, she wondered if the ghosts of the graveyard wandered through, unseen by all eyes, trapped in their own afterlife of trees. Lula had always told her stories when she was little about ghosts in the woods. She said that there was a ghost for every tree, and they all came out at night when no one was around. Dakota never really believed her, but she liked to hear Lula tell stories.
The roads were quiet, just as they were whenever she had visited the woods at night. It was a quiet village and no one was out at this time of night, except the occasional dog-walker or couple on their way back from a night out.
Dakota got as far as the next village before Jackson tracked her down and dragged her into the car.
TWENTY-THREE: An Ordinary Life
The drive home was unusually silent. Jackson didn’t shout at he
r, but only asked her one question:
Was she all right?
When they reached the house, Lula wailed at her, tears on her face, a trail of unintelligible words coming from her contorted mouth. Dakota could only make out the odd word and just wanted to crawl into her bed and stay there until her sister had gained her composure.
Jackson led her into the kitchen and sat her at the table, putting his arm around Lula and pushing her down into a chair. In moments, he had poured them all a glass of wine and put lit cigarettes in everyone’s hands. Dakota was amazed at his composure but still couldn’t bring herself to look into his eyes.
“OK, you need to tell me why you left,” managed Lula, finally. “If it’s because I wouldn’t let you go to Ireland I won’t believe you. I want to know why you wanted to leave in the first place.” Silence fell over the kitchen.
Dakota’s eyes flicked across to meet Jackson’s, and for a second, she thought she saw fire behind them.
“What? You don’t like Jackson?” Lula half shouted, having seen the exchange between her sister and her boyfriend. “I thought you two got on all right now?”
“I think we just rub each other up the wrong way,” Jackson replied in place of Dakota.
“I don’t want this to be a problem, D. I thought we could all live together; we have been doing OK, haven’t we? I mean, you haven’t had any big arguments, have you? Is there something I don’t know?” Desperation echoed in her voice as she sucked away on her cigarette, seeking strength in the wine.
“No, there’s nothing you don’t know. We just don’t really get on, and I wanted some space, that’s all,” Dakota lied brilliantly, sad that her plans of freedom were dashed and that she would have to go on with life as it was. She half feared that Jackson would beat her later for trying to leave him; after all, he had once said that he would kill her if she left him. By now he would know that she had asked to go away to Ireland, and would want to know why she was trying to get away from him.
Purgatory Hotel Page 17