by Will Harker
“You’re saying he’d kill two people to give himself an excuse not to go on stage?”
“I’m saying he’s an egomaniac with substance issues who maybe thinks he can genuinely talk to the dead. Don’t forget, Genevieve Bell didn’t start out believing she was a real medium. As Evangeline says, that fantasy only gradually became her sister’s reality. Darrel is currently the subject of vicious online and media persecution. What if his defence mechanism is to fully embrace the identity he’s created? Then he isn’t a liar anymore. He’s a maligned hero. Anything that would threaten that idea of himself would be intolerable. Exposure on national television, for instance. He might go to extreme lengths to avoid that.”
“We’ve tried arranging an interview,” Tallis said. “But Sebastian Thorn, his manager, has put a block on it and called in the lawyers. Doesn’t want the press getting a whiff of Everwood being involved in an active murder case.”
I nodded. “I got the same reaction from his PA.”
Tallis held out his hand. “Give me your phone, Scott.” Frowning, I handed it over and watched as he tapped away at the screen. “My number, in case you get any more bright ideas.”
He handed it back and I saw his full name for the first time. Thomas Tallis. Hadn’t there been an Elizabethan composer with that name? Haz would know.
“Just one more thing,” I called out as DCI Tallis moved away.
“Who are you?” He grinned back at me. “Lieutenant fucking Columbo?”
“Were there many fingerprints at the Bell crime scene?”
“Of the killer’s?”
“No. Of Gennie’s?”
“Hardly any, now you mention it. Why do you ask?”
“I suppose there wouldn’t have been,” I said. “Not if she’d become accustomed to wearing those black lace gloves. Doesn’t matter.”
He headed off and I shoved the phone back into my trenchcoat pocket. The memorial for Tilda appeared to have broken up and most of the showpeople had either gone back to completing odd jobs on their rides or were taking an afternoon nap before the gates opened at seven. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and so decided to grab a bite at the trailer. I could report my findings to Dad later.
I was already inside the tin box and closing the door when I noticed Haz sitting on the bed. He was running his fingertips across the built-in wardrobe—the spot I had splintered and bloodied with my knuckles last night. Hearing the click of the door, he turned, stood up, and came to me, taking both my hands in his.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Where have you been?”
I regretted the coldness in my tone at once. I hadn’t intended it. Didn’t think I’d intended it, anyway. He flinched but didn’t pull away.
“I just needed some time,” he said.
“Same here. I told you that in my text this morning. The difference between us is, I respected your wishes.”
Why are you doing this? a voice inside my head screamed at me. I had no answer.
“I’m sorry,” Haz murmured. “You’re right. It’s just, Sal called me saying that Jodie wanted to do something special for Tilda, and would I come back? We tried getting hold of you but your phone was switched off. She did really well. Jodie, I mean. And I thought, since I was here, maybe we could talk.” He turned his head towards the blood-flecked wardrobe before lifting my bruised hand to the light. “Scott, what’s happening?”
In the end, it was me that pulled away. “You know what’s happening. You’ve seen it before.” I went and stood at the sink, my back to him. “But you never want to talk about what happened in Bradbury End, do you? With Garris and Lenny Kerrigan and Gerald Roebuck and the others. How can you be so incurious, Harry? Don’t you want to know why he blackmailed you into playing that role? Don’t you care about what I’ve sacrificed to keep you safe from him? Don’t you wonder why I wake up screaming every night? No. Because you’re a selfish coward who can never face the reality of what I really am. So don’t pretend you want to know what’s happening right now.”
“Scott, please,” he said softly. “If you ask, I’ll tell you—”
“Tell me what? That you haven’t been going to choir practice? That there is no choir? That you can’t stand being around me? That I frighten you and so you’ve found someone else?” I watched his reflection in the little window, and in his guilt and misery saw my suspicions confirmed. He hadn’t been shaping poppet dolls out of wax and murdering psychics. Of course, he hadn’t. That was laughable. He was Harry Moorhouse. All he’d done was to find a bit of comfort and safety in the arms of someone who didn’t terrify him. I felt my heart sink through the floor. You stupid bastard, Jericho. “Haz… I shouldn’t have said that.” I gripped the countertop. “When this is all over, maybe then we can…?”
I turned to find the door open and Harry gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I decided to put Haz out of my mind for good. There was no coming back from what I’d said to him. I even wondered if, subconsciously, I’d done it on purpose—pushing him away as brutally as I could so that he’d never see the real me. Not in its raging, mindless totality anyway. He had someone and I was glad. Well, if not glad, in some sense relieved that at least I knew and now I could concentrate on what I did best.
So I ignored my hollow heart and sat watching the chapel door. It was dark and bitterly cold in the winding medieval streets of Aumbry. The little cathedral city on its hill dominated the flat, rolling fenland for miles around, the spire of its great church standing like a ship mast amid a sea of glinting dykes and waterways. Most pilgrims would head straight for that soaring beacon but my focus this evening was a meaner, less traditional house of God. Attached to the door of the derelict schoolhouse was a sign proclaiming: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST THE REDEEMER: Enter, sinner, and beg forgiveness.
I’d already poked my head inside an hour ago, and I had to hand it to Christopher Cloade, you couldn’t accuse his poster of false advertising. The building in which his ministry was almost certainly squatting had been about a quarter full, twenty lost souls grovelling before his altar. The spectacle reminded me a little of Dr Gillespie and his disciples, except most of Cloade’s congregation had the excuse that they were either tanked up on lager or sky-high on meth. Possibly both. I listened to a vivid description of the agonies of hell and then headed back to my bench on the other side of the street.
Before leaving the fair this afternoon, I’d strolled over to the Ghost Seekers production trailers in the hope I might bump into Everwood. Still reeling from what had happened with Haz, I knew I had to control my emotions. The rawness inside me could easily switch to anger if I tried to force an encounter that was rebuffed. If I was then reported to the police, that might be the end of my cosy relationship with Tallis.
On the driveway near the house, I’d caught sight of Nick replacing a tyre on that presidential Bentley. He glanced up when my shadow fell across him. He looked brighter today, his pale skin smoother, his pupils no longer those worrying fixed points. A smudge of grease had marked that freckled snub of a nose and the old cigarette burn in his palm was almost obliterated by dirt.
“All right there, Scott,” he said. “How’re things?”
I almost told him then, everything that had just happened between me and Haz. I’ve no idea why. Although a word of comfort from a man who’d known me in my darkest moments might have been welcome. Perhaps I had wanted that from him. Perhaps more.
“I’m fine,” I said. “What’s happened here?”
Balanced on his haunches, Nick held up a long iron nail. “Must have hit it on the journey over last night. Just another thing to put the boss in a bad mood.”
I’d nodded, remembering that Everwood had mentioned the puncture in his self-pitying rant. “Can I see?”
I took the nail from Nick and rolled it in my palm. It was a masonry nail, exactly the same kind as the dozen or so that had been hammered into Tilda’s corpse.
“When exactly do you think this happened?”
I asked.
Nick shrugged. “Could’ve hit it at any time.”
“But the head is relatively clean.” I showed it to him. “And the forest road is filthy from days of rain and from our trucks and the punters’ cars. So you must have run over it pretty close to where you eventually stopped.” Which either meant that the killer had dropped it as he passed over the drive heading towards the fair or else… I shook my head. It was a common masonry nail, the kind used by Travellers every day to repair their rides and stalls. It might mean nothing at all. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m daydreaming. Have you had any luck getting me a face-to-face with Darrel?”
He straightened up, and taking a rag from his back pocket, started cleaning his hands. “I’m really sorry, Scott. Especially as I know it might be important in finding the scumbag who did this to your aunt, but even the police can’t get access to Darrel. His manager has got involved and the old guy’s like a bulldog protecting his pup. If I even mention you wanting an interview, that’ll be my arse kicked to the kerb, and I need this job.”
“I don’t want to put you under any pressure, Nick,” I assured him. “I’ll see if I can find another way.”
I’d started towards the forest road when he called out: “Are you sure everything’s all right? If you need to talk, you know where I am.”
“I do. Thanks.”
Now, as I watched the doors of the old schoolhouse swing open and Cloade’s bedraggled congregation swarm out into the dark, I thought back to those nights Nick and I had shared together. Apart from that one time when he’d revealed the secret of his scar and the abusive father who’d inflicted it, we hadn’t talked much about our personal lives. And that seemed to have suited us. The sex alone had been enough of a diversion from the ugly world we inhabited. Perhaps that kind of relationship, shallow and functionary, was what I was best suited for.
I crossed the street and was ready to catch the door when the last worshipper exited. The man, shivering and practically toothless, grinned at me as he popped a biscuit into his mouth and worked it busily around his gums.
“S’all over,” he garbled. “You’re too late to be saved, matey.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said, and pressed a tenner into his hand. “So what do you think of the preacher here?”
He winked, pocketed the money, and running his finger under his lip to make sure he’d got the last of the biscuit, said, “He’s a fucking loon, but then most of them are. Long as you play along with their claptrap, you get to warm your bones awhile and there’s usually something to eat at the end. This one only hands out weak orange drink and broken biscuits, but considering he looks half-beggar hisself, what can you expect? One thing I’ll tell you for free.” He motioned me closer and I decided to brave the halitosis. “He’s scared shitless of something. Weren’t like it last week, so it must be something he’s seen or done in the past few days. He’s been clutching onto that good book ’til his knuckles turned white, anyway.”
I thanked my informer and stepped inside the chapel.
Cloade stood with his back to me, fussing over something at the altar—a simple plank of wood covered with a white cloth and supported on breezeblocks. At the sound of the door, he gave a shrill cry and swept around. I managed to catch sight of a white paper bag, blotched at the bottom with large, reddish-brown stains, before it was thrust into his jacket pocket.
“The evening service is over,” he trilled, stalking towards me. “If you come tomorrow then—”
“Do you turn sinners away so easily, Chris?” I asked.
He jerked to a halt. “Mr Jericho? I… I’m sorry. I didn’t recognise you for a moment. The light in here isn’t good. And I fear…”
I nodded. “I can see that, Pastor. I think you fear a lot of things. Why don’t you tell me about them?”
He lifted a shaking hand to his mouth and twittered like a bird. Meanwhile, those bulbous eyes, red-rimmed and etched with veins, stared at me from behind the broken Cartier frames.
“She’s haunting me,” he whispered.
“The little girl you hurt?” I suggested.
He shook his head and clucked. “No, no, not her. God wouldn’t allow her to haunt me. I’ve prayed and done enough penance to wash that sin clean away. In any case, she isn’t dead. Not like her.”
“You mean Genevieve Bell? But why would she haunt you?”
“I don’t know,” he almost shrieked. “All I wanted was to bring her the comfort and solace of the Word. Now I see her everywhere. In my dreams, in the street, outside my window at night, even here in the sanctity of His house. She had no respect for His laws in life and so has none in death. ‘There shall not be found among you any one who useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.’ Deuteronomy.”
“Then why don’t you cast her out? As a man of God, isn’t that within your power?”
“I am weak,” he said, leaning in as if to share a confidence. “And so the right is denied me. Would that I had the strength of that trumpet that felled your walls, O Jericho.”
“I don’t think she’s haunting you at all, Chris,” I told him. “I think it’s just good old-fashioned guilt. You tried to con her out of money, didn’t you?”
“Those were the wages of sin,” he insisted. “Earned through foolishness and falsehood. She told me so.”
I nodded, guiding him over to one of the folding chairs that stood before the altar and sitting him down. I then knelt beside him—an old interview technique I’d used with skittish suspects to make them feel as though they were in control by assuming a submissive posture. It also allowed me to get closer to that pocket containing the stained paper bag.
“Why don’t you tell me how you first met her?” I said. “I know you went to Cedar Gables not long after Genevieve’s podcast with Dr Gillespie.”
“Him? He’s as damned as she ever was. A materialist putting his faith in the false idol of science. They will all burn, you see? Just as Judas burns in perpetuity for his betrayal and despair. He hung himself high but as the last breath left him, so his soul was dragged down deeper than any.”
“Hanged and then burned, eh? Like the witches once were?”
He clapped his hands and stamped his feet like a delighted toddler. “Yes, yes, well said! She should be burning now, of course, but somehow her soul has escaped perdition. I knew she was a wily one, even when I visited her after the podcast and held out the chance of absolution. She sounded so contrite after her tricks were exposed. So broken. I thought she might require my ministry to mend her foolish ways.”
“You thought her a fool?”
“A disciple of the first deceiver. Yes. But…” He suddenly looked unsure. “I found her so very weary. A grey-haired woman of forty, not the Delilah I’d expected. Yet she seemed open to reform and redemption. She gave me a contribution to my church and said we should talk again, but afterwards she wouldn’t return my calls.”
“And did that make you angry, Pastor? No more money for your mission, no celebrity to endorse your cause?”
His overlarge eyes narrowed. “She ought not to have rejected His beneficence. But she…” He turned in his chair and gripped my hand in a clammy fist. “She frightened me. She frightens me still.”
I pulled my hand away. “What have you got in your pocket, Christopher?”
His startled scream shattered the stillness of the old schoolhouse. It was like the cry of a child scalded with hot water. What happened next was over so quickly I barely had time to register the pain before I heard the scrape of his chair, his running footsteps, and the chapel door slamming shut behind Christopher Cloade.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I’d been reaching for the edge of that paper bag protruding from his pocket when I caught a flash of movement. Later, I’d realise that he’d snapped off the broken arm of his glasses and then used the exposed metal prong to stab at my left eye. Fortunately, he’d misplaced his aim. The makeshift weapon had pierced the skin of m
y temple and scraped along the bone, opening up a gash that ran into my hairline.
A second after the door slammed, I was on my feet. I’d almost made it out of the chapel when a wash of blood spilled off my brow and into my eyes. Using the cuff of my coat, I cleared my vision, and on seeing that slick, red mess, felt a cold fury unfurl in my chest. Back at the altar, I ripped away the sacred cloth and tore off a strip of material, winding it hastily around my head. Almost at once, I could feel the throb of blood pulsing through the layers.
Outside again, the night air made my senses reel. I doubled over, grabbed my knees, sucked down a huge breath, and looked up. I was certain I must have lost Cloade. But there, at the corner of the street, I saw my toothless informer. He was pointing excitedly towards an alleyway that ran between an off-licence and a chip shop. Fighting back the urge to hurl my guts onto the pavement, I set off in his direction.
“Running like the devil’s after him!” my new friend cackled. “So you better catch him before you bleed to death.”
Wheeling into the alley, I glimpsed Cloade as he disappeared through a distant gap in the wall. Men and women appeared to be lounging either side of this spot, the glow of their cigarettes igniting like fireflies in the dark. A few had noticed the raggedy preacher as he passed them and now stood hooting after him. Meanwhile, my footfalls echoed from wall to wall while the fury prickled under my skin.
I’d reached the gap in the wall—the rear entrance, I now realised, to a pub’s crowded patio area. Over the heads of the drinkers and smokers, I saw Cloade shoulder his way through a back door and into the heaving bar. I tried to follow but one of the men who’d been hurling catcalls after him suddenly seemed to have a change of heart. The terrified scarecrow in the charity shop suit was clearly the victim here and needed both his and his friends’ protection. When I tried to pass, he snatched hold of my collar.
“Hold up, son! Hey, I said, hold up!”
“Take your fucking hands off me,” I grunted.