by R. L. Nolen
Trewe leaned back. “And then there was one.”
“That we know of anyway. Victoria Benton, age fourteen. Disappeared six months ago from Devon. Her parents received her shoes by parcel post.” Jon set the list on the desk. “That must have been horrible.”
Trewe growled, “So why do you include Annie in this fantasy of yours?”
“Because of the herbs and shoes.”
“Herbs and shoes?”
“Each body was found with herbs or something significant about shoes. What I would like you to do, if I may be so bold—”
“Nothing has stopped you before.”
“What I’d like to see happen would be that Victoria Benton’s DNA from a hairbrush or something be compared to the body from the surf.”
Jon noted the angry stance Trewe took, as if he were fighting a losing battle and would never admit it. He would have to allow the man to save face. “Look, the mere fact that he used the other shoe to hang in the tree speaks more than words, in my opinion. For her sake, man! There were herbs tied into the string around her neck!”
“What do the herbs mean, is the question.”
“Herbs do have meaning. People study and write books about it.”
“And of course, you would know your herbs.”
“As it happens, I do.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
The course Jon had taken had been boring. The real reason he had attended had been the girl he was seeing at the time. He realized Trewe was staring at him. “Cecelia Jaggi, the first girl, had ivy twined in her hands and a package of periwinkle seeds stuffed in her mouth. Ivy represents wedded love and fidelity, but the periwinkle is Fione de Morte, the flower of death, from an Italian tradition of laying wreaths of periwinkle on the graves of dead babies.”
“And she was pregnant.” Trewe tapped a finger against the wall. “I get it. Go on.”
“The first murder seems disorganized. She was strangled, but the herbs suggest that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Did he not want the baby? Did she push him over the edge? By the next girl, Alice Dorset, he’d perfected his methods, or at least he was calm about murdering her. Rosemary and Elder branches were found on her body. According to an ancient custom, burying Elder tree branches with the dead protected the soul from evil. Rosemary is for remembrance, and her mother’s name was Rosemary. So we can conclude by inference, the killer perhaps didn’t relish the killing but was interested in her mother—or hated her mother.”
“Amazing what you can learn in those courses.” Trewe’s tone was sarcastic.
They were interrupted by Mrs. McFarland when she poked her head through the door to say that breakfast was on the sideboard and ask if Mr. Trewe cared to join them.
Jon wondered if she’d been listening. She’d never before come to tell him breakfast was there; she’d always left him to find it. She flushed pink as Trewe stood.
“I don’t want anything, Mrs. McFarland,” Trewe said. “I’ve got to be going.”
“I’ll be down in a moment, thank you,” Jon told her. He watched her walk downstairs before he shut the door. He continued, “Most of this I’ve been researching on the Internet since we last talked. The rue stuffed in the bra? Rue is for repentance or regret.”
“And the girl had a reputation.”
“Exactly. Only in this instance, the death was violent, so there was no regret there. He must have thought the girl needed to repent for something and she hadn’t.”
“Okay, I’m listening. Annie Butler had thyme in her neck cord,” Trewe said.
“Thyme grows around here. In days gone by, specifically in Wales and probably here in Cornwall, thyme’s flowers were thought to hold the souls of the dead. Hence, thyme for death. The fact is, he found a bit of thyme that had a blossom. He used it specifically, when a sprig from a wild bush, which would not be blooming, would be more convenient. I think this was not so much a murder as a burial.”
“Deadly thyme. Sounds as if you have him figured out.”
Jon took a deep breath. “I believe this is a man who believes he is above the law. He has been doing this for some time and has not been caught. Now he is flaunting it. But he is either quite superstitious, or he believes in ceremony. Why? Is it regret? Perhaps he believes he is humane so killing isn’t part of his nature. Is he attempting some kind of atonement for himself by including ceremony in the burial? He forces himself to carry out some sort of elaborate burial practice where each time the plant material is tied in some way to the dead, but not to him. I believe he still feels some security because nothing’s been in the press about any connection in the other deaths. Probably thinks he got away with it again. And there’s one other thing.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve been wondering why he didn’t molest the girl. Why not? He’d violated her by taking her blood. So why not sexually? Then, it came to me. He’s impotent.”
“That’s hitting a little close to the bone, son.”
Jon sat back at that. “That could be one reason he didn’t.”
“Or perhaps sex is just something you are fixated on, Mr. Graham. This is not a pedophile. And the herb theory is interesting but thin, very thin. Meanwhile, I’m pursuing the idea that Mr. Tavish knew more than he was letting on. There must be a reason he had his head bashed in.”
“I imagine he did know something. How long has he lived in Perrin’s Point?”
“About twelve years.”
“So he hasn’t been here much longer than Ruth Butler. Where did he move from?”
“Wales.”
“I wonder how long the killer has been here and where he moved from. He can’t be a native, because others would know and wonder about him. Being an incomer creates its own peculiar lack of anonymity.”
Trewe stood, put his hands in his pocket. “With your theories there must be a reason Tavy had parsley tucked into his pockets.”
“Parsley?”
“Don’t miss your breakfast.” Trewe huffed and exited Jon’s room.
Annie studied the water in the pool. By some odd quirk of nature, a deep gouge at the center of the floor had filled with water from a thin rivulet of water streaming down one side of the cave. There must be a reason that the water never overflowed the pool and it stayed a constant level, but she couldn’t see how.
The water was crystal clear. There were shiny things at the bottom.
A sound behind her startled her. It couldn’t be the man, it was daylight. She turned too quickly and her head began to pound again. The light made her dizzy and her sight blurred. A shadow moved. She knew it was the man and she needed to be lying in her bed pretending to sleep. Move! She moved—but not quickly enough. The great hulking shadow became him. She sat still again, looking at her hands, trying to hold back tears. He caught her awake.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Looking at the water.”
“If you fall in, there won’t be anyone to save you. No one will hear your cries.”
“I’m careful. The chain will keep me here.”
“True, true.” He gave an awful chuckle. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Will you unchain me?”
“I’ll take you for a car ride. Fresh air.”
“There’s plenty of fresh air here.”
“Don’t be cheeky.”
Think Annie, think! There may be a chance of escape. She said, “Yes.”
“You’ll write a letter to your mother?” He was drooling.
He leaned too close to her and she wanted to spit in his face, kick him where it counted, and gouge his eyes out, but she forced stillness into her limbs. She could endure his reeking breath. She had to be free of the chain. But if he laid a hand … “What do you want the letter to say?”
“That you will be allowed to rejoin her if she will meet me.”
He was mad—stark-raving. The way his eyes looked when he spoke about her mother—there was something wrong there, bent, like a bolt
hadn’t been screwed in right and now everything inside this man had fallen sideways.
Her insides hummed. He was lying. The stark knowledge of something terrible became clear in her mind: her mother was in danger, more danger than even she was in chained to a cave wall inside a mountain of rock. Her mother would not escape this danger because she would not have time to think, time to whittle away the rock from around the bolted pipe. “Sure,” she said, “Where is the paper to write on?”
“I’ll bring it next time I come. Perhaps tomorrow. You’ll do it, then?”
“Yes.” What choice did she have? It wasn’t until he had gone away again that she wondered why he would let her go if she did what he asked. She knew his face. She knew he must live in or near the village. He looked familiar, like she’d seen him around the village, but not acting weird like he was when he was in here.
No, she didn’t believe he would let her live. She grabbed the chain, furious at it. She pulled it and jerked it around trying to get it loose. She screamed until she was hoarse and fell to the mattress. Sobs wracked her. No, he wouldn’t let her go. He would not care what happened to her after he had her mother. He would not bring her food, he would not take her filthy rags away to wash them, and he would let her die. One thing she knew—and it was real—he must not be allowed near her mother. She must think of something convincing to write, something that would give her mother a clue.
The tiny cuts along her arms and legs itched. One in particular on her left leg looked infected. She splashed the cold water on it. She washed the cuts with soap he had left her, but this one wouldn’t get better.
35
Thursday afternoon
Ruth finished with her workout. The activity not only helped keep her strong physically, but it also helped her to think clearly. She still needed a walk or a jog in the lanes around the village and along the coast. The sky and the land worked together to open everything up with fresh air, birdsong, and the distant bleat of sheep. As she rounded a curve in the land, she startled a group of four wild ponies. They tossed their winter-thick manes and flicked their tales and moved up the hill away from her. She jogged past.
Her mother had gone through everything in her liquor cabinet. She must have some secret helper buying her more, because Ruth hadn’t been to the grocery or the liquor store since Annie disappeared. Then there was Sam. He had shown up with his new tactic of moaning, moping and sighing. She wasn’t sure it hadn’t been Sam sticking to her like a coating of paint that needed to be peeled off. Sam was likely her mother’s liquor supplier.
She ventured along the cliff path to one of her favorite spots among a grouping of huge boulders. There was a place she could sit and look out at the sea, the color of jewels sparkling in the sun. The boulders sat around her like quiet companions. The air was pungent with the scent of new spring grasses. With her back against the sun-warmed rock, the chill of the breeze didn’t bother her. She watched the sea where white horses danced across distant waves.
She reflected on the conversation she’d had that morning with Sergeant Perstow. He’d caught her sobbing in the churchyard and he’d asked her to walk with him as he was just going to pop in to see his lovely wife for his lunch break. He was so kind to patter on so cheerily. Then he had said the thing that set her to sobbing again, “God is still listening, lass.”
And she had said, “Have you ever left someone in anger, determined to never speak again? And then you find you have to, because without speaking to Him again the world didn’t need to go on and may as well end?”
He hadn’t replied, only nodded. And she said, “I hadn’t prayed in years; now I can’t stand not to. But I left God for so long, I don’t think He wants to hear from me. Why doesn’t He answer?”
“Sometimes it feels like He has fallen asleep, p’r’aps?”
“I’m scrabbling around down here, useless, while my daughter needs me. I pray and pray, but nothing happens. She’s alive. God must know where she is.”
“I understand.”
“No one believes me.”
“He sends His angels to watch o’er us, lass.”
“Where were the angels that Sunday morning, Mr. Perstow?”
“Watching. And where e’er she is, they’re watchin’ still.”
“You believe me?”
“A mother knows her own. If you say ’tis true, lass, I’ve no call disbelievin’ you.”
She had hugged the sergeant and walked away from him, then took the cliff path where she could be alone. She leaned back against a boulder. She wished she could believe as thoroughly as Sergeant Perstow. An unfamiliar dark car turned into the lane below the boulder patch. The driver was too far away to identify. The car slowed, pulled into the layby, and stopped in the shade of some trees. The motor was switched off. Peering down from her high perch she could see there was someone in the back seat. She stood taller to get a better look.
It was then that she heard the noise, like a muffled scream. Could someone be in trouble? She stepped down the path. The car’s motor roared to life. Gears ground and belts shrieked. The car kicked up gravel as it spun into reverse and whipped back onto the road.
Was that a little girl’s hand clutching at the back seat?
Her breath left her. By now the car was too far to read its plate numbers. An old dark car—the police were looking for the driver to help them with their inquiries. She ran. The car crested the hill and disappeared over the far horizon, traveling away from the village.
The creeper chained her again and left the cave and Annie alone. She screamed, “Come back here, you filthy bastard!”—the worst words she could think of.
He didn’t come back.
She could hardly believe that she had been that close to her mother. The creeper had been driving. She was strapped to the seat in the back and couldn’t see where they were. When he turned the motor off, she had scrabbled around and was able to free a hand and use it to pull herself up and peek over the back of the seat.
Her stomach hurt so much. She crumpled into a sobbing pile on the nasty mattress. She had only wanted to warn her mother, but her cries brought her mother closer to the car. If the creeper had gotten out of the car then, with her tied up in the back, her mother might have been hurt. She couldn’t let him hurt her mother. She would have to be smarter.
She strained at the chain again. Her wrist was raw and painful where the metal cuff bit into her flesh. Rock dust flaked to the knobby floor beneath the pipe in the wall. She would clean it up, drop it down the hole. The bolt was wobbly. Her heart beat double quick. She was going to get loose.
She had enough length of chain to move to the rough toilet built over a hole in the cave floor, to the pool of water at the center of the area, and to lay on the pile of rags he called her bed. Every few days, she would wake up with clean sheets. The wake times and sleep times blurred together. She couldn’t understand why. He left her soup sometimes. After the soup, she always slept. He must be putting something in it.
The reeking, padded mat that kept the cold to a minimum at night, the thing with the dangling button in one spot—he never cleaned it. She ripped the button off. It was a large, cloth-bound button, soiled around the edges. She pressed the side with the metal grommet into her palm, rubbing the smooth cloth side with the thumb of her other hand. So far, it was the only thing she had been able to reach that was not tied down or soft. But what could she do with a button?
Ruth rang the police from her mobile, but hung up before anyone answered. What would she say? She’d seen a dark car? The driver had been wearing gardening gloves? Light faded beyond the cloud-blurred horizon as Ruth made her way along the cliff path back toward the village. On the way she saw the sign for the short path to the Hasten Inn Bed and Breakfast, where Jon Graham was staying.
She could tell him that she saw her daughter. Yes, and everyone would think she’d lost her mind. She had to have something definite, right?
She wiped her sweaty palms along her jeans. The so
re hand was healing well. She had seen Annie. Her daughter was alive. She knew it beyond a doubt before, but now, now she had absolute proof. Even if no one else believed it, she did. Thank you, Jesus, it was an answer.
She kept to the wider path and walked toward her cottage, but just as she stepped down to High Street, she paused and looked back. Fifty feet back along that path, the B & B sign stood. Okay, she was desperate. So what? She could at least press Officer Graham for answers.
Ruth hesitated after entering the B&B’s entrance. Mrs. MacFarland greeted her and, when she learned why she was there, directed her to the guest’s lounge. Ruth didn’t want to barge in and interrupt, so she opened the door quietly. Jon was bent over a large dictionary-like book that lay open under a lamp.
He shut the anatomy book. He turned as she came in, and when their eyes met, his opened wide in shock. He said, “Mrs. Butler?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Graham,” Ruth said, “something’s happened.”
“Tell me.”
“I saw a little girl in a car. It was an old Renault. I couldn’t read the plates.”
“Was there something that led you to believe the little girl was in trouble?”
“Yes.” She rubbed her eyes with her good hand.
Jon pulled out his mobile. “Where was this?”
“Up the cliff path, just south where there is a bend. It’s private land and there is a lane with a place to park beneath the hill. The car pulled in there.”
“And what happened?”
“I think the girl was screaming.” She held a hand over her mouth, breathed deeply with her eyes closed, then put her hand against her chest. “I hope she wasn’t hurt. But I think she saw me because she screamed when I stood up.”