by Will Harker
“But you say Everwood is confident about the show?” the host asked.
“More than confident, Sinead. Here’s a clip of what he had to say to us earlier…”
The mockney accent was firmly back in place, but Darrel sounded more keyed up than ever. “No one is going to believe the shocks we’ve got in store. This isn’t just going to be a television event—it will stand as an epoch in world history. For centuries to come, our descendants will look back on this day and say, ‘That was the point when everything we thought we understood about life and death was changed forever.’ At eight o’clock this evening, I, Darrel Everwood, will shake the very fortress of mortality and allow the dead to return.”
Switching off the radio, I thought back to the phone call Everwood had received, the one after which his entire attitude towards the broadcast had changed. If the killer—or killers—were playing with him, then perhaps this time the plan was to mock their victim before he met his fate. Public humiliation preceding his ultimate punishment.
I was so caught up in this idea that I’d automatically slowed the car to a standstill before I realised what had happened. The motorway before me dipped gently downwards, and I could now make out half a mile of gridlocked traffic with the distant speck of a jack-knifed lorry tipped onto its side. Hundreds of engines were suddenly silenced as we all settled in for the long wait.
An hour passed. Then another. By five o’clock, I was still eighty miles from Purley and we hadn’t moved an inch. There were rumours among the other motorists that the crash had been a bad one with multiple fatalities. I threw another couple of paracetamols down my throat and called Tallis.
“Scott?” he said. “Where are you?”
I could hear the buzz of the fair in the background.
“Sorry, I had to call in on an old friend. Look, in case I don’t make it back in time, there’s something you should know.” I explained to him the possibility that we might be hunting two killers. When he started questioning me about my sources, I shut him down. “Just bear it in mind. I’ll be with you when I can.”
I ended the call just as the traffic started moving again. Still enough time if… The key turned uselessly in the ignition. Immediately, a barrage of horns blared behind me as my eyes snapped to the dashboard. The needle on the fuel gauge stood at empty. I had topped up the tank on my way over to Noonan’s so how the hell—? That smirk of Timmo’s face came back to me. Siphoning off my fuel—a petty prank he imagined might win him kudos with the boss.
“Little bastard,” I muttered.
In the end, a kindly Samaritan helped me push the car onto the hard shoulder, where I waited for a breakdown service to come to the rescue. They promised to arrive in half an hour. At six o’clock, the rain started in earnest, great sheets lashing the motorway, throwing up a pale mist through which headlights glanced like passing phantoms. I knew I wasn’t getting back to Purley by eight. Instead, once my tank had been replenished, I drove on for another thirty miles before pulling into a huge service station complex.
My phone buzzed as I limped across the carpark and into the vast food court. Every taste catered for here, so long as that taste ran to bland and oversalted. I glanced at the caller ID: Haz. I was tempted to answer, to put myself out of my misery, but at that moment I was cold, wet, hungry, in pain, and trying to make sense of a clue that wouldn’t fit. I didn’t have the energy for a breakup too. I let it go to voice mail.
Grabbing a powdery coffee and a listless burger from one of the outlets, I shuffled my way around the eating area until I found a clean table. I ate mechanically, drank the coffee, and stretched out my injured knee. A bulge of swollen flesh bloomed at the joint. I knew that when I finally peeled off my jeans, it wasn’t going to be a pretty sight.
“You’re telling it wrong! It’s, ‘Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? Because the parrots-eat-em-all.’ Not, ‘Why are there no paracetamol in the jungle?’ If you start it that way, the joke doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, that’s how Mark told me at school.”
Two kids arguing at the next table. The younger looked about Jodie’s age, his brother perhaps twelve or thirteen.
“Well, you’re probably not remembering exactly what he said.” Big Brother sighed in a teacherly tone. “People never repeat what they’ve been told. Not word for word.”
“I s’pose,” the smaller kid agreed. “Maybe they put things into their own words instead?”
The mother, a long-suffering parent with the look of someone who’d already endured many hours of backseat bickering, caught my eye. “Sorry, are they disturbing you? Please, turn down the volume, boys.”
“People never repeat what they’ve been told,” I echoed. “Not word for word.”
Taking in my bandaged head and the dried bloodstains on my shirt, the mother seemed to decide that making small talk had probably been a mistake. The quarrelling brothers were quickly ushered to a table on the far side of the food court. Meanwhile, I sat and stared into space. Both, Mark. Tell Scott, I saw both of them. But as the little geniuses had just said, we very rarely repeat back precisely what we’ve been told. Instead, we interpret what we believe was the meaning behind the words and then rephrase them. And of course, there was the fact that Noonan had always had trouble interpreting Nick’s broad Yorkshire inflections.
The breath caught in my throat.
That was the moment the truth hit me, in all its horrific inevitability.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered. “But that’s impossible.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I was reaching for my phone to call Tallis when the big screens mounted around the food court snagged my attention. The broadcast from Purley had begun.
As Everwood had promised, the intro to the Ghost Seekers Halloween special was spectacular—an aerial drone shot of the clearing, the blaze of the fair glowing in the dark bowl of the forest like embers in a witch’s pyre. The shot swept on, zooming around the track of the rollercoaster as punters screamed from their carriages, zipping to the heights of the Ferris wheel, and then down to take in the mannequin monsters stationed outside Tommy Radlett’s ghost train. As the show’s misty logo appeared onscreen, so Purley Rectory came into view. I had to admit, with the low-angled spotlights enhancing its aloof and chaotic façade, the house looked suitably spectral.
There was a small stir in the food court. At a table nearby, a young woman with dyed purple hair and an impish face grabbed her friend’s hand.
“Oh my God, it’s that Darrel Everwood thing!” she cried, pointing up at the screen. “I totally forgot this was on. My mum loves him, but I reckon he’s a complete nutcase. Aw, I’d like to have watched it, though. Steph at work said he’s going to actually summon a real ghost or something. I wonder if we can get them to put the sound on?”
Every screen was currently muted.
“Billy’s got his tablet,” her friend said, looking over at the third occupant of their table. “Be a love and put it on for us.”
Clearly not the biggest Ghost Seekers fan, Billy groaned and started rifling through the backpack on the seat next to him. Meanwhile, I staggered to my feet and hobbled over to their table.
“Excuse me, I happened to overhear your conversation and I wondered if I could join you for a moment?” All three looked up at me with expressions of concern similar to that of the longsuffering mother. “I’m supposed to be there tonight,” I said, gesturing towards the screens where Everwood had just appeared. “My name’s Scott Jericho and I—”
“Oh. My. Freaking. God!” the impish girl squealed. “That was the name of the fair! My mum told me, and it stuck in my head because it sounded so pretty and unusual. So you’re, like, the owner?”
“Son of,” I smiled.
Billy glanced up from his tablet. “Then why aren’t you there?”
“I had a car accident,” I said, eliciting sympathetic pouts from the girls. “My family’s been working on this with Everwood for months, so I’m really gu
tted I won’t be able to make it back. I would try watching it on my phone, but for some reason the volume doesn’t work on my media player.” This, at least, was true. “Do you think—?”
“Of course!” the impish girl said, grabbing Billy’s bag and dumping it on the floor so that I could sit. “This is so exciting. You’ll have to tell us what he’s really like. I mean, is it true what his ex has been saying? That he can’t really speak to dead people? That he makes it all up?”
“I guess we’re going to find out,” I said.
Billy perched the tablet at the end of the table so that we could all see. Behind it, a silent big screen played along in time. From multiple tables nearby, I could hear excited chatter as other diners followed our lead and crowded around their phones and devices. The buzz was palpable and I wondered if Gillespie’s sceptical documentary would be generating the same kind of reaction. For all the doctor’s showmanship, I doubted it. The unromantic reality of the real world could never compete with the promise of ghosts. Perhaps, in the end, that was the only sane explanation for these killings.
I looked down at the phone in my hand. When the show was over, I would have to decide how the case played out. Sam Urnshaw had wanted Tilda’s murderer delivered up to private justice—an instinct that I’d once thought jibed with my own rage and desire to see the guilty punished. But Sal had urged me not to lose myself in the hunt. My dad hadn’t made his view known but had seemed to trust my judgement. I already knew what Harry would say. As for myself, I was undecided. Would I end up calling Tallis or the killer?
The sound kicked in on Billy’s tablet and my gaze returned to the screen.
Everwood was standing in the Victorian sitting room where, not many hours ago, Miss Rowell had confided her secret. Much of the clutter had been cleared away so that the only furniture remaining was a single high-backed armchair. The lighting was subdued, the glow of a fire in the grate providing an atmospheric flicker. The medium was dressed in a red silk smoking jacket with a mustard-coloured cravat tied around his throat. A bold choice of costume that provoked snickers from Billy.
“The time has come,” Darrel said, his intense gaze focused down the camera. “As many of you know, the entire Ghost Seekers team and I are grieving the loss of one of our own. Just today, our friend and colleague Sebastian Thorn was ripped from this world in the most violent and despicable way imaginable. Our dear Seb, who for decades has been an advocate and champion of powerful and gifted psychics. But I am here tonight to tell you… He is not lost to us.”
I could hear hysteria in Everwood’s voice, keen as razor wire. It even seemed to be infecting his limbs, small shudders animating his hands and shoulders.
“He’s doing it,” the girl beside me squealed. “The possession thing!”
I thought back to the clip they’d played on breakfast television. Everwood in the darkened passage of a Scottish castle, shuddering and whining as the spirit of some long-dead laird spoke through him. In the ghostless environment of Purley Rectory, I wondered which fictional personality he would claim had taken control of his body. Perhaps one suggested by a killer, whose very existence, I now realised, accounted for Darrel Everwood’s newfound enthusiasm for the event. In his manic and paranoid state, he must not have only accepted that existence but embraced it as a vindication of his life’s work.
“Some of you watching will also be m-mourning the pr-premature deaths of loved ones,” he said, his words suddenly stilted. Halting. “Muh-others, fathers, s-sons, daughters, ch-children, all taken from you before their time. Well, take heart. I have suh-een the dead returned! Not just in spirit. But b-body.”
“Oh, this is priceless!” The impish girl and her friend both had their phones out and were busy scrolling. “He’s trending already. Hashtag: Darrel is losing it. Hashtag: Everwood is the real deal.”
“I will pr-prove to everyone that death is not the end,” Everwood went on. “Here in the most h-haunted house in Britain, I call upon the veil to be t-torn aside and for the dead to appear. Let the wuh-world see you as I have seen you. The doubters. The scoffers. The sc-sceptics. Their time is over and ours has begun.”
Suddenly, he dropped into the highbacked armchair, and the spasms which, until that point had been no more than tiny jerks and twitches, intensified. He raised his hands to his face, his fingers closing into frozen claws. His lower jaw jutted outwards, the bottom shelf of teeth projecting in front of his top lip, and then roving side to side in a strange rhythmic motion. Eyes horribly wide, he appeared to be fascinated with the hands that remained bunched up in front of his face. Then a huge convulsion shot through his body like an electric current. His legs appeared to stiffen until his heels rested on the floorboards and his shoulders arched into the chairback.
“I don’t like it,” a child whispered behind us. “Daddy, turn it off.”
The girls at our table exchanged glances and even Billy looked a little unnerved.
Our attention returned to the screen. A long, low whine was projecting from the throat of Darrel Everwood. His head began to thrash up and down as if he was violently agreeing with some imperceptible spectre standing before him. Then his eyes rolled white in their sockets and that jutting jaw fell open, yawning wider and wider, stretching to an almost impossible degree. With his chin resting against his chest, those straining lips appeared grey and bloodless.
“He’s trending number one in the UK,” the girl murmured. “But that little kid’s right. I don’t like it either.”
Neither did I.
Because suddenly I realised what was happening here. I’d seen it once before in a case Garris and I have investigated a few years ago. Not a common method of murder these days, but the odd instance cropped up from time to time. In that case, a wife had been forced to ingest a lethal quantity of rat poison. We’d received a tipoff and arrived at the house an hour after she’d swallowed the stuff. Everything was done to save her but there was no known antidote for this particular toxin.
I pulled out my phone and fired off a text to Tallis: STOP IT RIGHT NOW. NOT AN ACT. EVERWOOD POISONED WITH STRYCHNINE.
Onscreen, the medium was now balanced on his heels and shoulders, the centre of his body arching outwards. It was as if his arms and legs had been weighted down while an invisible rope had been tied around his middle. Slowly, this unseen tether appeared to be winched in, concaving Darrel Everwood’s spine to the breaking point. Then all at once, he collapsed into the chair, gasping, choking, only to be jerked back into that same exaggerated posture. This happened five or six times, the heels of his boots rapping out a hollow tattoo on the floorboards.
It was as clever as it was cruel. The ultimate act of mockery, not enacted prior to death, as I’d originally thought, but at the very same moment. No one was rushing to Everwood’s aid. They had seen his possession routine before. They believed his death throes were all part of the show.
We watched on as the killer’s final victim jerked and thrashed, foaming at the mouth, clenching his jaw, bending his spine until surely it had to snap. Watched the inexpressible agony in his every hideous contortion. Watched the unspoken pleading glisten in his eyes. Watched until at last the life went out of him and he slumped back into the chair.
As a nation, we watched a man was murdered live on-air. Watched and did nothing. Darrel Everwood had been right all along.
This would be remembered forever as the media event of the century.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I had thought that the killer might have entirely abandoned their ritual in the public execution of Darrel Everwood. But replaying those final moments in my head, I wondered if that was true—the flame-red smoking jacket, the mustard-yellow cravat, the glow of the firelight flickering across his agonised body, and then there was the choice of strychnine as the poison. Perhaps not only to mimic the medium’s possession routine, but in those flailing, tortured movements, to suggest the agony of a burning witch.
That was what I thought as I limped out of the
motorway services towards my car. In fact, this insight turned out to be just another that didn’t quite hit the mark.
I had left the people at the table in a state of confusion and horror. A reaction that was probably being shared in households up and down the country. Many might think that what they’d just witnessed was a joke—a gruesome Halloween stunt designed to shock the nation. I imagined furious parents jamming the phone lines of the TV station, demanding to know why Darrel Everwood had just traumatised their little tykes. From what the girls had told me, I knew social media was in meltdown. As well as the public, reporters, politicians, influencers, and celebrities all appeared to be gripped by a collective hysteria, everyone posing theories and demanding answers.
I dropped into the driver’s seat. The rain was still falling, a drenching blast that came in gusty waves across the windscreen. I wiped my face on my sleeve and spent a few minutes staring through the downpour. I knew I couldn’t have saved Everwood. The realisation of what had really been happening in this case, had come too late. But still, the clues had been there right from the beginning, their true significance just waiting to be appreciated. If I hadn’t been so distracted at the prospect of losing Haz, would I have seen it earlier? I only knew that the fury I had expected to experience at this moment was not there. Instead, all I felt was a weary sort of sorrow that made me dread the confrontation to come.
My phone pulsed into life. A call from Tallis. I turned off the handset and went back to staring at the rain.
I left it until just after one in the morning before starting the car and continuing my journey to Purley. In those long, dark hours, I had checked and rechecked my theory against the facts. One clue central to the murders had suddenly illuminated a separate puzzle. A human drama that had been running alongside the main event and which had also distracted me. If the players in that little production were still up and about, then it might be worth having a word with them too.