by Will Harker
Not the most diplomatic of responses, it led to Cloade’s champion and three of his mates attempting to pin me to the wall. I’d probably lost a quarter of a pint of blood by this stage, but I’d been throwing harder and soberer men than these off fairgrounds since I was fifteen years old. I didn’t even need to dig into that bag of bare-knuckle tricks my father had taught me. The back of my head shunted into the champion’s nose and he slid to the cobbles. My left elbow found a yielding cheek. My right, a soft stomach and a ladder of ribs. Turning around, I was confronted with three men on the ground and one still upright, a stray house brick in his fist. He appeared to conduct a short debate with himself, glancing between me and the brick before finally throwing it down the alley and claiming that he ‘wasn’t looking for any trouble.’
Following Cloade’s example, I shouldered my way across the patio. Not that much shouldering was now required. Practically everyone made a path for me and even the bouncer held open the back door.
“He’s legged it through the front and into the street,” he said. “Could tell he was weirdo, just by looking at him. You a copper or something?”
“Or something,” I agreed.
Just as the cold had set my senses reeling, now the heat of the bar sprang a sickly sweat at the nape of my neck. Customers gawped and glared at me from their tables, a carousel of expressions that blurred into a single hideous leer. By the time I reached the exit, the back of my shirt was drenched and the blood was in my eyes again.
I cannoned into the street, cuffed my face, and gulped down the icy air as thirstily as any drinker at the bar. Luckily, it seemed I wasn’t the only one suffering a disadvantage. The pub let out onto a cobbled hill that ran steeply down towards the riverside. Staggering on his way, pinballing almost from pavement to pavement, the preacher appeared to be running out of steam. I watched for a second as his hands clutched for the support of lampposts and parked cars. And then I saw the broken glasses with their thick lenses in the gutter at my feet and understood that Cloade was running blind.
I took off again. Antique shops and chintzy tearooms flashed by, the kind of picture-postcard attractions that tourists delighted in. Now closed for the day, I wondered what their clientele might have thought had they looked up from their Darjeeling to witness a blood-soaked madman hurtling past. As it was, there was no one to see as I began to make up the distance that separated me from Cloade.
A blast of car horns, a screech of brakes. The preacher stumbled into the busy road that intersected the bottom of the hill. I followed, dancing around swerving bonnets, glimpsing my Halloween mask of a face in the mirror of windscreens. Then the safety of the far pavement, where the oaths of motorists were drowned out by the roar of the river.
Cloade’s head whipped around when I called his name. At first, I wondered if he was going to climb up onto the low concrete parapet and hurl himself into the torrent beyond. Swollen by the recent rains, the black ribbon of the river churned and eddied, whitecaps chasing each into the vanishing dark. But then I saw him drag the paper bag from his pocket, and pulling back his arm, prepare to launch it over the wall.
My rage overwhelmed me. All the grief and horror and frustration of the past twenty-four hours tearing out my heart and into the iron grip that closed around the preacher’s elbow. I wrenched his arm with such force I was certain I must have dislocated it. The whole limb seemed to slacken and become boneless in my hand, like a stunned fish on the deck. In the end, it was this same force that sent the bag flying from his fingers. Cloade’s entire body had surrendered to my attack so that the momentum twisted him back around to face the river where, released, the bag tripped lightly across the parapet and dropped into the swell.
I let go of Cloade, who fell moaning to the pavement, and I leaned over the wall. The yellow glow from a nearby lamppost helped me locate the sodden pulp of the bag, already disintegrating under fists of water. But this wasn’t the sight that held me. Thrown clear of the bag, its contents were drifting like sinuous eels in the sweep of the current, snaking together before finally being pulled apart and separated forever. Black, gleaming, gone: the long lace gloves given to Genevieve Bell by Tilda Urnshaw.
Bloodstained, if those marks on the bag were anything to go by.
I turned back to Cloade.
“She left them for me,” he wept. “She haunts me, you know.”
Pulling out my phone, I called Tallis.
“I’ve spoken to our marine unit,” the DCI said. “The divers are going to give it a go in the morning when the level’s down, but they don’t hold out much hope. This is a tidal river and it flows fast back up to the Wash. Even before it reaches the sea, there are a hundred different arteries and tributaries and whatever else.”
“Needle in a haystack.” I nodded and winced.
The paramedic glueing my head back together at the roadside told me not to be a baby. When he was done, I stepped down from the ambulance and wandered with Tallis over to the parapet. There, we looked into the boiling rush.
“There won’t be any forensic evidence left anyway,” I said. “Probably not worth the public expense.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“What has Cloade said about it?” I asked.
The preacher had been taken to hospital before being formally interviewed, just to be on the safe side. Despite what I’d initially thought, it appeared his arm remained fully intact. I wasn’t sure whether I was glad about that or not.
“Not much. Just that he believes the ghost of Genevieve Bell left her gloves for him in a blood-stained bag on his altar. He’s convinced they were hers, by the way. Said he recognised them from his visit to Cedar Gables.”
“But why does he think she’d leave them?” I asked.
“‘To torment him,’ he says. ‘Like the demonic witch she is.’” The chief inspector took a pebble from the parapet and sent it skipping across the river. He looked more boyish than ever. “But why would the killer leave them for Cloade in the first place? Unless he is the killer, of course.”
“He’s got the conviction but not the brains,” I said, shaking my head. “It seems to me there are three options here. The killer is playing with Cloade, someone is trying very clumsily to frame him, or else he’s working with the killer.
“In the first two scenarios, the murderer must have been at the chapel tonight, disguised as one of the homeless worshippers. It was dark in the street, so I wouldn’t necessarily have recognised anyone if they’d put some effort into their disguise. If it’s an attempt to frame him, it was a ridiculous one—they had no guarantee he’d be discovered with the gloves. So that leaves the third scenario, that he might be an accomplice, perhaps helping to divert suspicion.
“Despite what he believes about his ministry, Christopher Cloade is a follower, not a leader. If he could be convinced that his salvation depended on it, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.”
“I agree.” Tallis nodded. “By the way, what do you feel about pressing charges against him for the assault?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather have him out and about. He might lead us to something.”
“Or he might end up killing someone.”
“Even if you arrested him, he’d be out on bail soon enough. It’s not worth the effort.”
“All right. But I’ll still need an official statement from you. Feel up to coming back to the station with me now? I can drop you back to your car later.”
I agreed and we made our way over to Tallis’ gleaming Volkswagen Golf. Through the passenger window, I could see an interior as forensically spotless as the car’s unblemished bodywork. I even felt guilty about smearing the door handle with my fingerprints. I was about to ask if he was sure he wanted to risk my slightly bloodied trench coat on his upholstery when I caught sight of Haz.
He was coming out of an Italian restaurant across the street. Smiling that warm, open Haz smile as a young man in a dark overcoat helped him on with his jacket. I watched as he turned to thank t
he man, his hand resting against the stranger’s arm. An intimate, trusting gesture. Good-looking, well-built with wavy blond hair and kind eyes, the man then said something and Haz laughed. I hadn’t seen him laugh like that in weeks.
“Scott?” Tallis frowned. “Everything all right?”
I nodded and opened the passenger door. “Just laying to rest a few ghosts of my own.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“So anything you can’t touch and observe and evaluate is a lie? Even love.”
I woke with only the fragments of a dream. Haz’s words and the fading image of him standing with a stranger, the road that divided us expanding and liquifying until it ran like a river. A torrent littered with bloodied gloves and tarot cards and the bloated corpses of the chattering dead. Toothless mouths agape, calling to me with ringing voices…
My eyes snapped open. Without thinking, I rolled across the bed and pulled my phone from its charger. I didn’t even glance at the caller ID before thumbing the screen.
“Huh-ello?”
“Scott, I hope I find you well and ready to talk at last?”
I sat bolt upright. “No, Peter. You don’t.”
Garris sighed. “I happened to call your father last night, just for a social catch-up. He wondered if we’d had some kind of falling out, not having seen me since Bradbury End. Sharp as ever, your old man. Anyway, he told me about poor Tilda Urnshaw. I’d guessed something of the sort must have happened after seeing the news. I know you won’t believe me, but for what it’s worth—”
I gripped the phone until the casing squeaked. “Do you get a kick out of this, you sorry old sack of shit? Pretending you actually have the emotions of a real boy? You’re a psychopath, Garris. You’ll never be a real boy. We both know that this is just you wanting to wheedle your way back into my head. And you know what? I’m actually tempted to let you in. Maybe it would take someone as twisted as you to make sense of that rat’s maze I’ve got between my ears. But… no. I don’t think I’m going to tell you anything.”
A beat. I could hear him breathing lightly at the end of the line. “I could make you tell me,” he said. “I still have the recording, remember? The one where you describe what Harry did to his father.”
I felt the casing crack under my hand. “If you want to hurt anyone, you come after me. If you so much as look sideways at Harry Moorhouse, then I swear to God I will make you suffer beyond anything even your rancid mind could invent. Haz deserves…” I swallowed hard. “He deserves his chance to be happy.”
“He deserves his chance,” that neutral voice echoed. “Something’s happened between you, then? Scott, I am truly sorry if—”
I turned off the phone and threw it to the end of the trailer.
Then, my head still pounding, I staggered over to the sink. After making my statement to Tallis at the station last night and him driving me back to my car, I’d asked the inspector if he fancied a drink. It wasn’t some desperate rebound thing. I didn’t particularly fancy him and I wasn’t even sure Tallis swung my way. I just didn’t feel quite ready for my own company. Anyway, he’d politely declined and I was soon back at the fair where, after a heroic ten-minute battle, I surrendered to the half bottle of Scotch and a couple of sleeping pills I’d been saving for just such an occasion.
Now, I poured a bowl of cold water from the canister by the sink and splashed my face, careful to avoid the surgical glue that held my forehead together. My physical pain, at least, seemed to be centred there. A sharp, hot throbbing that made me wonder if the wound was infected. I slapped my tongue against the roof of my mouth, tasted the metallic residue of the sleeping pills. With the waning effect of the drug still in my system, I knew my thoughts would be sluggish for the rest of the day. Some way to catch a killer.
“Selfish bastard,” I muttered to myself, and went in search of my phone.
2:43 pm. The time and a text alert from Tallis glared up at me almost accusatorially. Nothing more from Cloade, the message ran. Still insists he found the bag on the altar after the evening service. Refuses to give names or even descriptions of his congregation. The homeless man you mentioned is known to us and I managed to have a word with him this morning. He thanks you for the tenner. Says those attending come and go—no particular regulars and he doesn’t know all of them. No one stands out in his memory. First sweep by the marine unit has come up empty-handed—no sign of Genevieve’s gloves… I’m sorry, btw, if I seemed standoffish last night. Maybe a friendly drink when the case is done. Tom
I washed and dressed quickly, pulling a beanie hat over my wounded forehead before stepping outside. I had some thought of checking the communal post box by the gate to see if my copy of Hearing the Dead had arrived ahead of schedule when Sal ran into my path. She’d been playing a chase game with Jodie and the other chavvies. Her expression darkened when she saw me. The munchkin herself squealed and started to dash over, asking breathless questions about Haz: “Did you hear our song for Aunt Tilda? Is Uncle Haz coming back again today? Can we go and see him if not?” Sal ordered her away and I could see the tears start in Jodie’s uncomprehending eyes.
“What the hell have you done now?” Sal demanded when her daughter was at a safe distance. “I called him this morning and he sounds devastated. Of course, he’d never say a word against you, but I could tell—”
“Enough,” I said. “Sal, I mean it. Enough. What goes on between me and Haz is none of your business.” When she started to argue back, I shot her a look I would later regret. “I don’t want to hear anymore about it. Not from you, not from anyone. Are we clear?”
“You’re on something again,” she said in a brittle voice. “Pills or booze or both. Is that why he left?”
I felt my lips twitch into a hard smile. “Whatever you think he sounded like this morning, he’s most definitely not devastated. He’s got someone else, OK? I’ve seen them together, and you know what? I’m happy for him. Genuinely. And you and Jodie and everyone else who’s fallen in love with Harry Moorhouse on this fair should be happy for him too. I was never worthy of being loved by someone like that.”
Sal’s face crumpled. “Scott. No. What are you saying? Of course, you’re worthy—”
I pushed her hands away when she tried to reach for me. “I don’t want to hear it. If you ever speak to me about him again, Sal, that’s it. We’re done.”
I left her on the side ground and made my way towards the forest road. I already felt sickened by what I’d said, but couldn’t bring myself to turn back and start making apologies. That would only lead to more discussion on a subject that made my heart ache. Fortunately, a diversion was ready and waiting on the driveway to the rectory. Everwood’s Bentley appeared to have suffered another puncture and he was standing to one side of the car with Deepal Chandra while John Chambers screamed in his face. Meanwhile, Mrs Chambers hovered behind her husband, making ineffectual attempts to pull him away.
“Do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done to us?” Chambers asked, a spray of spittle flying from his lips. “To our family? To my wife? Show him, Anne.” When Anne Chambers tried to resist, he dragged her forward so that she stood almost toe-to-toe with Everwood. The psychic shrank back. “Go on, show him.”
Both Everwood and Deepal looked on, horrified as the grieving mother’s coat sleeves were pulled up and her scarred forearms displayed. Even from a distance, I could see those intersecting tracks glinting in the pallid autumn daylight. Mrs Chambers flinched while her husband raged on and Deepal took out her phone.
“You ripped our hope away,” he said. “Tore out the last of it so we had nothing left. Even if we didn’t believe what you said about Debbie, everywhere we looked—the papers, the telly, the internet—there you were, insisting over and over, dead dead dead dead. No one should ever do such a thing to people who are suffering like we are. People who’ve lost something so precious. It’s cruel. Inhuman. And why did you do it, eh? For a few column inches, for another scrap of attention to feed your fu
cking ego? You deserve to burn in Hell for that, Darrel Everwood.”
Chambers started to lunge forward, and reaching the group at a run, I caught him under the arms and hauled him back. He was a small man, almost weightless, and I wondered if the stress of the past six months had eaten away, not only at his nerves but his body. He felt like a bundle of loose bones under that waterproof jacket, a frame on the point of disintegration.
Dragging him towards the carpark, I shouted back at Deepal, “Don’t call the police. Let me handle this.”
Anne Chambers threw the PA a pitiful look. “Please. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
Meanwhile, Everwood appeared to be watching me closely.
Near the opening to the avenue of trees, I released John Chambers. He spun around to face me, almost tripping over his own feet so that I was forced to catch him again before he fell into the mud. It made me ashamed to do it, as if I’d stripped away some vital layer of his dignity. Anne hurried to his side and clutched at his arm, pulling him back when he tried to confront me.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What gives you the right—?”
“My name’s Scott Jericho,” I said. “And believe me, I have no sympathy for Darrel Everwood, but nor do I want to see you arrested. I used to be a detective and I’d like to help you, if I can.”
Anne looked at me with such hope in her eyes I almost had to turn away. “Do you think our daughter could still be alive?”
“I think…” These broken people—they’d been tormented for so long by a psychic’s guesswork—at least I owed them the truth. “It’s very unlikely.” I sighed. “But you’ll have been told all the statistics. Keeping Debbie alive this long would have become too much of a risk for whoever took her. I’m so sorry.”
As her husband crumpled against her shoulder, Anne turned a defiant gaze upon me. Despite initial appearances, she was by far the stronger of the two.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I know you are. She told us that our girl was alive and that, if we could hold on just a little longer, we’d see her again.”