Silencing the Dead

by Will Harker

  “Seeing the opportunity this afforded you, I think that was the day you fixed on for Tilda to die. But sourcing a costume quickly might prove difficult, especially as you lived in the middle of nowhere. Then again, there’s an item in every house that can be quickly adapted into a rudimentary costume. A white-sheet ghost, this one a little more gruesome than is traditional, with its bloody smatters, but still unremarkable in a crowd of monsters. Unfortunately, while crossing the drive to Purley you dropped a couple of the masonry nails from your bag and was then spotted lurking in the trees.”

  “Poor mother.” Genevieve sighed. “It might have been easier in the end to kill her, too. But as selfish and manipulative as she was, she did love me. I think even in her addled state, she remembered how she’d exploited me as a child. Trying her best to go along with my plan might have been her way of making amends.”

  She stepped up onto the circular revolve of the ride and began moving among the gondolas, swinging them gently on their casters. In that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of the shy, playful child she had once been.

  “You weren’t just seen in the trees,” I said, following her onto the platform. “I was speaking to Christopher Cloade at the fair when he glimpsed you over my shoulder.”

  I thought back to that look of stark terror that had washed over the preacher’s face. Then his words, almost a whisper, “So it’s true. What they say about Purley…” A woman he knew by sight, who he believed had been brutally murdered, now stood looking back at him. A phantom returned.

  “I could tell straight away what he thought.” Genevieve laughed. “It was the same ridiculous thing Darrel Everwood would come to believe. You know, Mr Jericho, there is no fool on earth like a man desperate to wallow in his own fantasies.”

  “And of course his belief became useful to you,” I said. “You already had the perfect alibi for these murders. After all, who in their right mind would suspect the first victim? But why not take this chance to muddy the waters even further? You began turning up outside Cloade’s home at night, showing yourself to him in the street, slipping in among his homeless congregation. Haunting him. Then, seeing me waiting outside the schoolhouse to interview him, you took the opportunity of leaving your bloodied gloves on the altar.”

  She gave me an oddly bashful look. “He came to me after the podcast with Dr Gillespie had been aired. Caught me at my moment of crisis, waving his pamphlets, evangelising, saying he could save my wayward soul. He even got some money out of me before he left. Afterwards, when I came to my senses, I wondered if I should add him to my list: Evangeline, Tilda, Sebastian, Darrel, and Christopher Cloade. But that pitiful man wasn’t part of the legacy I needed to eradicate. Still, I thought he deserved a good scare for his impudence, and he made a rather enticing suspect, didn’t he?”

  “The legacy you needed to eradicate,” I echoed.

  She blinked at me. “Of course. Why else do you think they all had to die?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “As soon as you discount the ritualism of the murders, you not only see that the identity of the first victim becomes the crucial question, but that the motive must be linked to that question as well,” I said. “Who was the most likely person to bear a grudge against Evangeline Bell?”

  “Grudge?” Pausing behind one of the gondolas, she stared at me. “You think it was only that? Some pathetic resentment I harboured against my sister?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  She took a moment, closed her eyes, appeared to gather herself. “Remember me saying that I had always been a consummate little actress? That was true. In the plays we’d sometimes invent for our father before his death, Eva was the narrator while I played all the parts. Even as a child of eight, I had a flair for it, pulling on a mask and inhabiting other lives. It was how Eva knew that I could pull off that original trick and make Miss Grice believe that I was communicating with the dead. I was a quick study, as I told you, picking up the dramatic flourishes used by the clairvoyants who visited the house, learning how they threw their voices and contorted their features while apparently possessed. Of course, I didn’t realise then that I’d be playing the role of a medium for the rest of my life.

  “What I gave you in my performance of Eva, Mr Jericho, was an idealised version of my older sister. The one I wished and longed for. A failed protector who’d tried her best to save me. A remorseful soul tormented by what she’d done. In reality, Evangeline regretted nothing. In fact, after she had come up with the ‘joke’ of fooling our cousin, she realised that the trick had to be sustained. Our lives had been transformed overnight, remember. No more endless domestic chores, no more drudgery, no more earning our keep. We had become honoured guests at Cedar Gables. But I was just an eight-year-old kid who might give the game away at any minute. To maintain our new lifestyle, it therefore became crucial that I start to believe in my powers.”

  She looked down at her palms for a moment, flexing her fingers, perhaps picturing those black lace gloves that had been so much a part of her life.

  “You have to understand, a young mind is pliable,” she said. “Its understanding of reality is a day-to-day exploration of ideas, constantly evolving and shifting. There are no set laws, no boundaries, no absolutes. We’d been visited by Tilda Urnshaw, who showed us how to create the illusion of psychic powers but who also claimed that I did possess some latent paranormal ability. Eva seized on this. She began to suggest that perhaps we hadn’t played a prank on Miss Grice after all. That although that had been our intention we had, in fact, unlocked gifts already there. We should continue to use the tricks Tilda had taught us, just as a convenience, but there was no doubt, she said, that I was a very special young lady.

  “Those were the kindest words my sister ever said to me. Over the coming months, she began to reconfigure my reality, changing the very idea I had of myself, adapting my personality so that, slowly, gradually, I came to accept my new identity. I wasn’t playing a part anymore. I was the child who spoke to ghosts. She’d whisper to me at night, going over the ordinary incidents of the day, infusing them with a sense of wonder, always ensuring that I was at the centre of each rewritten event. For a lonely child, shunned at school due to her increasingly odd reputation, it was an irresistible fantasy. I was special. That’s why I was bullied, called names, set apart.

  “Genevieve,” I murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not entirely sure whether our mother knew what Eva was doing,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard. “On some level, I suppose she did. In any case, after months of my sister’s manipulation, the reality of my world had been set for the next thirty years. And of course, she happily accepted all the benefits. First, the little luxuries showered on us by Miss Grice, then the generous annual allowance I gave her out of the estate I’d inherited from our cousin. I even gave her a percentage of my earnings from the private readings I performed after I’d withdrawn from the public spotlight. Eva never had to work a day in her life.

  “And what a life! She left us at twenty, travelled abroad, had adventures, love affairs, saw the world. Meanwhile, I remained at home with our mother. I might get the odd phone call when she needed money, but otherwise, she became a stranger. She never regretted what she’d done. Never tried to dissuade me from the fantasy she had invented. Eva created a person that was never supposed to exist and then abandoned her creation to live out its make-believe life. A life in which I was utterly invested, convinced I was helping grieving people, that I was making a difference.”

  “And then you were invited onto the podcast with Dr Gillespie,” I said.

  “The offer came through Seb Thorn.” she nodded. “Another lie, I’m afraid, Mr Jericho. We did remain in contact after I stepped away from the limelight. I didn’t need the money, but I was intrigued by the idea of proving my abilities to such a renowned sceptic as Dr Gillespie. You know the result.”

  She reached out that blemished hand, as if clutching at the drifting mist.<
br />
  “What I told you about the effect it had on me was true. Imagine if for thirty years—pretty much your entire life—you’d believed in an identity that was suddenly torn away from you. Systemically, ruthlessly, brilliantly stripped away within ten minutes. Decades of self-deception crashing down until you’re forced to peer through the wreckage of your personality, only to find a stranger staring back at you. It was like waking from a beautiful dream to a howling, indifferent wasteland.

  “And so, no, Mr Jericho, I didn’t just bear a grudge against my sister. I wanted her dead. Erased from existence. Unmade, like I had been unmade.”

  “And unwittingly, Dr Gillespie provided inspiration for how you might do it,” I said. “He told you that what you’d suffered had been a form of abuse. That if there really was a God of the Old Testament, then this was deserving of all His fury and vengeance.”

  “It made me think of that line from the Bible,” she confirmed. “‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ That was the beginning of the smokescreen, as you call it. I did a little research into the old witchfinders, the poppet dolls, all the paraphernalia that might mislead the police. Christopher Cloade played his part, too. After his visit, I saw that such a fanatic could easily make a viable suspect. I had to give myself time, you see? To keep everyone guessing long enough so that I could finish the thing.”

  “To eradicate your legacy.”

  “I thought I’d been helping people,” she said. “Instead, I’d been lying to them. There are no ghosts. Nothing beyond death except the empty scream of the universe. When I looked back at my life, all I could hear was that scream and all I could see were the people responsible.

  “I invited my sister down for a visit, as you said. Not an easy thing to arrange, Eva had barely set foot in the house for years. She planned to stay just a single night to discuss our mother’s failing health. Her solution? Put the old woman in a home and forget about her. I knew that would be Eva’s response and I made sure Mother overheard it. Despite her confusion, the old self-interest was still there, and, later, it made her more amenable to my plans—discovering the body, playing along as best she could with the names.

  “Eva’s is the one death where I feel no remorse. I even enjoyed it. The obliteration of the person who started it all, the taking away of her identity. By the way, we had both turned grey in our late thirties, but after the murder, I dyed my hair to resemble her old copper tint so that I could further distinguish myself from ‘Genevieve.’ As I told you, Eva was divorced and estranged from her daughter, so she could easily disappear for a couple of weeks without being missed. And I never intended this thing to go on forever.”

  “Just until your four victims were accounted for?” I said. “The first three, you knew. That was why they were comfortable turning their back to you. Thorn must have been shocked to see his old client had returned from the dead, but at that moment there would have been nothing to alert him to any danger. Like with Eva and Tilda, you caved in his skull with a hammer before attending to the ritual elements of the scene.”

  “I turned up at the house in the early hours, saying I could explain everything.” Genevieve nodded. “He was shocked, as you say, but he’d only taken a few steps across the hall when I struck him.”

  “And Tilda?”

  She hesitated, her eyes once more following the undulations of the mist. “She didn’t seem surprised at all. She said, ‘I knew you weren’t dead, little Eve.’ She even…” Genevieve lifted her fingers to the side of her face. “She saw the hammer in my hand and she just turned her back, as if she’d accepted what was coming.”

  Even hearing this part of her confession, I didn’t feel angry. Dr Gillespie had been right, Genevieve had suffered a form of abuse—the warping of her identity to the extent that, when the trick played on her had finally been revealed, her mind had utterly shattered.

  “I didn’t blame Tilda,” she said. “Not in the same way I blamed Evangeline for starting it all. But still, she’d played her part.”

  “And you mocked her,” I said. “Just like you mocked Thorn and Everwood.”

  “The tarot card? That wasn’t a comment on Tilda alone. All believers are fools. Deep down, some of them even know it. That’s what they’re terrified of—that one day someone like Gillespie will come along and show them just how ridiculous their hopes and dreams really are.”

  It was a suggestion I might once have privately agreed with. Now I baulked at it. “What was done to you was terrible, Eve, but that doesn’t mean belief itself should be despised as foolish.”

  She shrugged. “Everwood was certainly a fool.”

  “Evangeline started the deception,” I said. “Tilda played her part in establishing it. Thorn then came along and reinforced it, spreading your fame.”

  “My lies.”

  “And Everwood was your legacy.”

  “When I heard about how he’d been inspired by my story? I felt this suffocating sense of responsibility. It had to end. Had to be torn up, root and branch.”

  “Before killing Eva, you got Darrel’s personal number off Thorn,” I said. “Despite what you told me, you’d always stayed in touch with your old manager. I should have known. You were so precise over details, yet you misnamed the man who’d made you a star. Rose instead of Thorn. Just to keep him out of the limelight long enough for you to get to him.”

  “I said that I’d been flattered by Darrel’s comments and wanted to speak to him personally,” she said. “But for Thorn not to say anything. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “And it was. When you finally placed the call, he thought it was a prank.”

  I remembered what Nick had said about Darrel’s reaction, “That’s some sick shit you’re talking. How dare you even pretend to be…”

  “Thorn had told me weeks ago that Darrel was becoming increasingly unstable,” Genevieve said. “Losing his grip on reality. It wasn’t hard to play on that sense of paranoia and persecution. He wanted to feel vindicated, justified in his self-belief, armoured against his enemies. In his delusions, I saw an echo of my own. He’d passed beyond the conscious trickster and into a state of wilful self-deception.

  “I convinced him that I was physically returning to the world. That the guiding light of his psychic gift had reached me on the other side. At the same time, I fed his fears that shadowy figures were working to undermine not just his own work, but the truth of all psychic phenomena. He ate it up. I told Darrel I’d visit him two hours before the broadcast, and if he summoned me, I would make an appearance on live television.”

  “The media event of the century,” I said.

  “He dismissed his security staff and waited for me inside his trailer.” She laughed. “He sat there, amazed as I walked through the door. A corporeal manifestation! I understand that it might sound ridiculous, but there is a rich history of mediums apparently summoning solid spirits. He even had to leave the room for a moment to gather himself.”

  “And that was when you administered the strychnine into the water tank of his coffee machine?”

  “Thorn had told me he was a caffeine addict, drinking cup after cup in quick succession. The strong flavour would disguise the bitter taste of the poison to perfection.”

  “You intended him to die live on-air,” I said. “To show the world how human and fallible these so-called psychics are. Because if he was the real deal, surely Darrel would have foreseen his murder.”

  “As you’ve probably guessed, I also suggested a costume change and for the fire in the sitting room to be lit,” she said. “He would be my last victim. There was no more need for the red herring of the ritual, but I knew you’d be watching, Mr Jericho. I thought the neatness of the idea might appeal to you.”

  “The burned witch.”

  “Perhaps.” She smiled.

  Genevieve moved back, off the revolve, and onto the walkway. There she faced me, resting her shoulder against one of the posts that held up the ride’s canopy.

  “
So what now?”

  I sighed and took my phone out of my pocket.

  “I once thought that the only real justice is the kind we make for ourselves,” I said. “But I don’t hate you, Genevieve. What you did to Tilda was cruel beyond imagining. What was done to you was almost equally inhuman. Not just in your childhood, but how you were forced to confront that truth. Everything that followed grew out of that trauma. And so this is the justice I choose.”

  I held up the phone.

  “Did you get all that, Inspector?”

  A solid form emerging out of the mist, DCI Tallis replied, “I did. Thank you for finally returning my call, Scott.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and moved towards the Waltzer.

  Genevieve Bell pressed her back to the wooden post. She smiled, and reaching inside her coat, brought out a small silver object. She played it between her fingers, thumbing the wheel. It was then I realised it wasn’t only the touch of the mist that had dampened hair and clothes. Powered by engines and generators, the air of fairgrounds is always laced with diesel and so I had missed the smell.

  “Eve,” I said. “Please. Don’t.”

  Her smile broadened. “You’re a good man, Scott Jericho. But I reject your justice.”

  Hair slick, coat saturated, face wet.

  Genevieve held the lighter against her chest and struck the wheel.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The glare of the inferno accompanied me into the darkness. I remembered lunging across the Waltzer’s revolve, grasping at a piece of tarpaulin that covered one of the gondolas, wrenching it free of its fastening. Already, Genevieve Bell was aflame. A vortex of fire engulfed her body, catching at the post that rose behind her like the stake in a witch’s pyre. It could only have been seconds before I reached her, but the accelerant was working fast. Her features could barely be glimpsed inside that raging cowl.