by James Oswald
‘Still not pros after you though.’ Pete’s shadow shakes its head. ‘Don’t mean to sound disparaging, but if they were, we wouldn’t be having this talk. Not here anyway.’
‘Heaven has bars, does it? Or are we both destined for the other place?’
It’s only as I say the words that I realise how crass they sound. How insensitive. I’m alive and Pete’s dead. Tortured for information, then shot in the forehead. I’m meant to be trying to find out who did that. How else am I going to make them pay? But I can’t do that if someone’s laid out cold cash to have me killed.
‘It’s all connected though, isn’t it?’ Pete’s voice thins as the night deepens, little more than the rustle of leaves in the gentlest of breezes.
‘What do you mean?’ I’ve been staring out at the black water, speckled with the reflection of the first stars, and when I look for the shadow shape my mind had decided was a person, I can’t see it any more. Just rocks and trees and water.
‘Think it through, Con. The pieces are all there.’
I can’t be sure this last cryptic and unhelpful clue is only in my mind. Then again, this whole conversation has been in my mind. Me talking to the silent gloaming. I open my mouth to ask another question, then slap at my cheek as something tiny bites at my flesh. Too late I remember what was bothering me before. The loch, the long grass and trees, the damp, still air.
In an instant I’m surrounded by a cloud of whining insect bodies. Where they’ve been until now, I’ve no idea. Maybe they don’t like ghosts. Maybe they were busy pestering someone else and have only now noticed I’m here, woefully under-dressed for a lochside summer evening in the Highlands. Too late I remember just how bad they can be, these dread Scottish midges.
Heedless of the uneven rocks and slippery shoreline, I fix my sights on the house and run.
33
The little buggers are in my eyes, my nose, my hair. I can hear them buzzing in my ears and crawling over every inch of bare skin. Not biting, at least not yet, but itching like crazy. It’s a stupid, rookie error. I’ve been here enough times before to know that you don’t go out at dusk or dawn without first dousing yourself in copious amounts of eye-watering and noxious chemicals. But, then again, I’ve not been here for going on fifteen years. I’ve lived in the dry south, and the depths of London, where midge is an ageing pop star who sang on a Christmas charity single before I was even born.
I spend a good ten minutes going round the house and making sure every window is shut tight. There aren’t many lights on, but it only takes one small entry point and the bastards will get in. Only once I’m sure I’m safe do I climb the stairs to my tower bedroom. When I stare at myself in the washroom mirror, my hair is all spiky and askew, my face smeared with the crushed bodies of a million tiny insects. Black spots in the corners of my eyes are yet more of them, drowned in my tears, and still I can feel them crawling over my scalp. I can hear Pete’s voice in the back of my mind, laughing at my discomfort. It doesn’t help my mood.
Standing under a hot shower in the en-suite off the master bedroom brings a small measure of relief. I don’t know how often Aunt Felicity comes here, but the cupboards are well stocked with toiletries. There’s a towelling bathrobe on the back of the door too, and enough clothes in the wardrobe to suggest she spends more time here than I thought. For all that I hated coming here as a child, I can understand why. The south of England has become so busy, so frenetic. Everyone is running just to stand still, especially in London. There’s never any time to just stop and think. Up here, with the silence so unnervingly total, and knowing there aren’t any other people within a hundred yards of me, I can finally relax.
On the other hand, this is a luxurious house, inherited wealth and privilege. All the things I swore I’d never come back to when I finally faced up to my father’s tyrannical misogyny and told him where to put it. How easy it is to slip back into a world where the little things are taken care of for you, where the bills are someone else’s problem and it’s more a question of what and where to eat than whether. I have to remind myself that this is a temporary thing. I sincerely hope that I’ll clear my name and find out who killed Pete as well as tracking down Izzy to make sure she’s safe, but when that’s done I will move on from this. I made it for seven years in the Met, I can reinvent myself without falling back on the family for help.
Cat’s curled up on Ben’s bed when I go back into the tower bedroom. I could sleep downstairs, but somehow I feel safer up here. A quick check of the laptop shows that it’s still working its way through Izzy’s hard drive and will probably not be finished for a few hours yet. It doesn’t matter, the hearty meal, fresh air and hot shower have worked their magic and now I’m way too tired to concentrate on any of that. It’s late too. Far later than I thought. The bed I slept on top of earlier in the day beckons me, its springs creaking as I climb under the blankets. For a moment I wonder whether the utter silence will keep me awake, but the low mechanical whirr of the hard drive in its caddy is enough to drown it out. As I drift off, I can almost convince myself I’m back in my flat in London.
Something wakes me with a start, and in an instant I’m alert, eyes open. I can’t hear any noise, not even the sound of the hard drive, so it was probably the program pinging to tell me it had finished. Either that or someone’s crept into the house and is coming to try and kill me. Over on Ben’s bed, Cat sleeps soundly, letting out the occasional whiffling snore, so maybe it’s not that. I check my phone to see that it’s not quite six in the morning, bright daylight outside. As good a time as any to get up.
I take the laptop and Izzy’s hard drive down to the kitchen. The casserole dish is gone, last night’s plate washed up and put away. Emily went back to the farmhouse when I stepped out for some fresh air, but she must have come back in and tidied. Unless she gets up even earlier than me and has been in this morning, which might explain the noise that woke me. When I open the fridge I can see that she’s put the stew in a plastic tub to reheat whenever I’m feeling hungry; so much like old Mrs Feltham I’m struck with a weird pang of nostalgia even though it’s less than a week since I last saw her. I stand there, the cold air falling from the open fridge door onto my bare feet, just staring at nothing as a horrible question forms in my mind. Will I ever go back to that flat? Is that life over?
The chill finally snaps me out of my fugue, and I close the door on the piles of food. I’m still too full to think about eating, but I find a cafetière and some of Rose’s ground coffee, set about making myself a brew. I take a bit of time to savour the first mug, then unlock the laptop and click on the folder to see what secrets have been uncovered.
There are thousands of deleted files, each with a meaningless alpha-numeric code for a name. Useful information like when they were first uploaded or created has long since been lost, but at least I can sort them by size. The largest files are most likely video and images, the smaller ones documents or maybe thumbnails. The file recovery program has had a stab at classifying some of them, but it was a freebie, nothing like as sophisticated as the analysis software we use at work. I’m going to have to do this the hard way.
The first few large files are indeed images, but nothing particularly worthy of notice. More of the party and the girl who must be one of Izzy’s school friends, a few pictures taken in and around Harston Magna and the Glebe House. I recognise Kathryn and her surly friend, the inside of the Green Man. The first video file I click on is corrupted, just jagged lines in multicolour. The sound is still there though, a curious huffing and groaning that sounds almost like a farmyard. Until someone screams.
I’m so shocked, I knock over the mug. Luckily for me it’s empty now, but my hand trembles as I reach out and set it upright again. The scream has quietened down to sobs, a young, high-pitched female voice muttering ‘no, no, no, no, no’ while the farmyard noises continue in the background. Except they’re not farmyard noises, not animal but huma
n. Male.
The file comes to an abrupt end, and I have to pour more coffee, drink half of it before I can bring myself to open up another. This time it’s a still image, but it’s not a school outing or some innocent teenage party. I’ve worked in vice, and my department in CID sometimes dealt with the more esoteric and barely legal kinds of pornography. I’ve seen stuff that would make you want to join a convent and devote yourself to Christ rather than look at a man, and I’ve seen stuff that isn’t pornography at all, even though sex is what drives it. The girl in this image is far too young to have given consent for what is being done to her, which makes it child abuse. The tears in her eyes, the running black of her inexpertly applied mascara, make it clear she isn’t a willing participant either. I can’t see the faces of the men; they wouldn’t be stupid enough to let that happen, although someone, somewhere, knows exactly who they are. I can see the face of the girl though, and now the dreadful poetry makes horrible sense.
Izzy DeVilliers ran away because she was being abused and filmed while it was happening. And if she had these images in her possession, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why her father doesn’t want her found.
34
It takes me a whole day to come to terms with what I’ve uncovered. Finding out that your father’s best friend is a serial child abuser is not something you can process casually, no matter how much the revelation is actually unsurprising.
My first instinct is to pick up the phone and call this in, but the knowledge of who I’m dealing with stays my hand. Roger DeVilliers managed to get even Professional Standards off my back, so his reach is far, his influence everywhere. I might have thrown them off the scent for a while by posting my phone back to London, but soon enough they’ll work out what I’ve done. It won’t take Adrian and his silent chum long to get my number plate on the NPR alert database, probably Aunt Felicity’s too if they’re even half competent at their jobs. Christ, I hope they don’t drag her into this.
I spend the morning going through as many of the files as I can stomach, gathering together as much evidence as possible. It’s harrowing work, even after I’ve downloaded a simple photo editing app to blur out the faces of the girls. I’m not interested in identifying those of them who aren’t Izzy. Not yet. For now I’m trying to see recurrent features in the men doing the abuse. Their faces might never be seen on camera, but there are more ways to identify a person than that these days. I’m hoping Roger DeVilliers doesn’t know that.
In the afternoon, I go for a long walk up the mountain. I remember as a child being forced to hike over the moors, and hating every miserable minute of it. Now with only sheep and deer, rabbits and eagles, for company, it’s the perfect antidote to the soul-sickening video footage I’ve been wading through. It gives me time to think too.
I really need to find Izzy. I understand now why she ran away, why she would have been difficult at school. It’s hard to understand why DeVilliers would let her out of his sight at all, but then the kind of man who could do what I’ve seen today would surely believe he had total control of her. And if it started young, then maybe he does. Almost. He must have a contingency plan though, probably more than one. He’ll have been seeding doubts about her mental stability for years, of course, but what will he do if he feels really threatened? How far would he go against even his own daughter?
When I get back from my walk, I can’t really bear to go over the photographs again, even though I know there are clues in them that will help put Roger DeVilliers away for the rest of his life. Instead, I flick through the files Izzy hadn’t deleted, and the folder labelled ‘Burntwoods’ that I’d been going to read through before I uncovered the horrible truth. I heat up some of Emily’s mutton stew in the microwave, pour myself a beer and settle down to read.
It’s not quite what I was expecting.
Burntwoods, apparently, was a large country mansion built in the early nineteenth century a few miles north of Dundee. Much like Harston Magna Hall, it was the centre of a large estate split up into several farms, but there the similarities end. Unlike the Fairchild way of passing the estate down the male line, Burntwoods came to a daughter of the family in 1875. Mirriam Downham, rather than finding herself a husband to run the place, took it on herself, and over the years it became something of a refuge for abused women and girls. Tragedy struck in 1930, when a fire all but destroyed the mansion, killing many of the women staying there at the time, Ms Downham amongst them. Various male members of the Downham family tried to press their case for inheriting what remained a sizeable and wealthy estate, but it appears Ms Downham had already transferred title to a trust, managed by her niece. The house was never rebuilt, but the Downham Trust still funds shelters for abused women to this day.
Izzy’s research is far more meticulous than anything I would have cobbled together at her age. There’s scanned images from old newspapers, copies of deeds and legal documents, endless articles about both the house and the trust, as well as plenty of photographs of Mirriam Downham herself. Burntwoods was an impressive building if the black-and-white pictures are anything to go by, but I can’t work out why Izzy would be trying to get there, if that was why she ran away to Dundee before. From all I can see here, the house was never rebuilt and the trust funds shelters all over the country. One closer to home or Saint Humbert’s would surely have been easier to reach.
I’m still puzzling that one out when my new mobile starts to ring. I stare at the screen as it shows a number I don’t recognise. Not Aunt Felicity, who’s pretty much the only person who knows this new number. Not any of the people I’ve added to the address book either, or it would show a name. Two more rings and it will go to voicemail, an anonymous welcome message that doesn’t confirm anything. I should let whoever’s calling speak to that. If it’s something important, they’ll tell me what, and if it’s an attempt to trace me it will fail.
Except the only way someone could have got this number is through Aunt Felicity. And if they’ve persuaded her to part with it, then I need to know who they are, need to know that they’re coming. I tap the screen to accept the call at the last possible moment.
‘Hello.’ I pitch my voice lower than normal, try to make it masculine.
‘He— . . . Hello? Is that Cons— . . . Miss Fairchild?’
A young woman’s voice, I can hear the fear in just those few words. I recognise it too. The Green Man in Harston Magna, a couple of underage drinkers. One who I used to look after when she was just a baby. I’ve not seen her in any of the photos or videos, so clearly she’s not Roger DeVilliers’ type.
‘Kathryn? How did you get this number?’
‘Oh, thank God. I tried to call you, but it kept going to message. And then it was answered and this man asked me who I was. I hung up sharpish. Didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered your aunt. Figured you’d be staying with her, not up at the hall. Not after . . . well.’
‘Is she OK? My aunt?’ I cut through the babble before it can get properly started.
‘Is she OK?’ A moment’s confused pause. ‘I guess so? She gave me your new number anyway. Tried to explain it to her, but . . . she said it was easier if I talked to you myself.’
‘What was easier, Kathryn? What are you trying to explain?’ I’ve a horrible feeling I already know, but I need to hear it from her.
‘It’s Izzy. She hasn’t called. I think something’s happened to her.’
The silence that follows goes on for so long, I begin to wonder whether she’s hung up.
‘Kathryn?’
The air in the kitchen is still. Outside there’s not a breath of wind. The utter lack of noise in this place used to freak me out as a child, and I can’t help but remember those nights when I’d wake a few hours before dawn, terrified that Ben had died in his sleep, straining my ears to hear his shallow breathing. To hear anything at all.
‘Kathryn? Are you still there?’
&nbs
p; Something like a sob comes down the line, and with it I hear noises all around. The house creaks and groans as its walls and floors expand with the day’s heat. Out on the edge of the loch a curlew is calling its low, bubbling whistle. A tractor chunters down the drive towards the old steadings.
‘You said Izzy hadn’t called. Is that something she’d set up? A regular contact with you?’
‘I’m not supposed to tell anyone. She was right stern about that. ’Specially not the police.’
As I hear those words, it all makes a horrible kind of sense. If Izzy’s father can pick up the phone and speak to Gordon Bailey, if he can have whatever misdirected witch hunt they’d set up for me called off, then of course he’s got the police primed to jump on anything that might even smell like his daughter leaking incriminating evidence.
‘If it helps, I’m not really police. Not any more.’
‘Yeah. I know. That other one told me.’
‘Other one?’
‘The bloke in the pub. You remember, right? That’s why you went out the back way?’
So much has happened in the days since I last spoke to Kathryn that I’d almost forgotten Dan Penny.
‘What was the deal with Izzy, Kathryn? I know what her father did to her, what she was running away from. Believe me, if I can find a way to put Roger DeVilliers behind bars I’ll do it. If I had my way, I’d be looking for a more permanent solution. Probably involving garden shears.’
Another pause, but it’s shorter this time. Then when she finally speaks, the floodgates open.
‘She said he was a monster. Showed me and Tina some photos and stuff and it was just horrid. I mean, proper want to throw up horrid. That man. Her own dad. How could he? But she couldn’t just go to the press, see? It was a journalist came to her in the first place. Said he was working on an exposition or something like that. Only he turned up dead in the Thames a few days later. That’s when Izzy said she’d have to hide. But she didn’t just want to disappear. What if that . . . man found her? I mean, he must have raped her a dozen times. More. Why wouldn’t he kill her this time? And she was scared. But she was also kind of angry at it all. And she had a plan, but it wasn’t ready. She needed to get away.’