Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

“Amanda’s friend Cassie Milos was the last person to see her alive. Said she was alone for a minute, maybe less.”

  He works fast, McBride thought. He’s perfected his M.O.

  D.I. Guy Johnson sneaked up to them from behind, a glass of cold water in one hand and another cup of coffee in the other. He offered it to McBride, but she turned it down.

  “Hey,” Elwood said, tapping her once on the shoulder. “Don’t look so disheartened. We win some, we lose some.”

  For a moment they were silent. McBride pointed back to the screen. “What if we’ve got a perv who uses the girls as sex slaves in a sadistic manner, then, when he gets tired of them, he burns their bodies; that way he makes it look like a sacrifice or the work of a deranged mind, but also gets rid of every trace of sexual assault.”

  “You still think these cases are linked?”

  “Which cases?” Dowd cut in.

  “You’re too young to remember,” Johnson said. “They took place between 1984 and 1990. Fifteen girls, four to fourteen years old, burnt to death, mostly in public dump sites. Perp even sent the police a video of one of the victims.”

  The videotape had been sent to the police station in the late 1980s. It showed a girl, tied up in a basement, screaming, before an unidentifiable person burned her alive.

  “The case is still open,” McBride said.

  “Wait, do you think it’s the same killer? That’s a hell of a cooling-off period.”

  “It has happened before: for example, in America, the BTK Strangler reappeared after a sixteen-year hiatus,” Dowd said.

  “True, but he didn’t kill anybody during that time, he just taunted the police.”

  “Still, the burning, the victim’s possessions removed…” McBride said. “I mean, that’s a very specific signature, isn’t it?”

  Johnson shook his head. “If this is the same perp, what has he been doing for the past ten years?”

  McBride had her own theories: that he’d been overseas, perhaps as a merchant or sailor, or on some army or RAF posting; that he’d been in jail for an unrelated crime. Theories, that’s all they were. “Can you check the M.O. against girls missing in different counties? It might explain the long absence.”

  “You really think that’s likely?”

  “If it is the same guy, then he spends time with them. There’s a good chance the girl that disappeared from Ocean Terminal is still alive.”

  “If it’s the same guy,” Dowd said, “we’re going to find her burnt up somewhere.”

  “How can there be people as sick as this?”

  P.C. Dowd shook his head. “Sometimes things are just weird. Remember the time we found the video of the woman pissing on a sheep?” He rolled over to his desk in the swivel chair and woke up his computer screen from the screen-saver mode. “This is kind of similar. Some of these art-house freak films make my skin crawl.” Using the computer mouse, he clicked Play.

  “Where did you get this? It doesn’t look like part of the pervert’s video collection,” Johnson said.

  “No, no. From the fire at the film society in Newington early this morning.”

  “The Archive? We weren’t there.”

  “We were. It’s in the same place as the halls of residence for the university. Some psycho set fire to the building. One person missing. He was working there late. This is a video we got from one of the computers there.”

  He clicked Play and a string of black-and-white images came onto the screen. The uniforms and detectives were unaware that they were among the first people to see the footage in more than a century. On the screen, a man was carrying a coffin while another stood watching. They were in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh Castle looming in the background.

  “Looks old. And just plain weird,” Elwood said.

  “This is even weirder. Check it out. It looks like there are actually two movies, one embedded in the other.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He pointed to the screen. “See, this is one. The guy carrying a coffin.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are random frames inserted between the frames of this film.”

  “Like images?”

  “Looks like it. Some pretty weird gunk.” He paused the film and ran it frame by frame so they could examine the hidden images.

  “What’s that?” McBride asked, pointing at a series of frames that looked like dominoes stuck together.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably frames destroyed by bad weather? You know, I would never have found this. The pictures flash on the screen at such a frequency that you wouldn’t normally see them. But my computer’s media player returned to the old settings by accident; I think it has to do with the number of picture frames the player shows every second.”

  He moved the frames forward with a push of the arrow key. The image on the screen was in black and white. It showed a little girl, sitting on a chair. She was around five years old, dressed in a light dress, her tangled blond hair falling on top of it. Her eyes were what startled McBride: the girl was staring straight in front of her, as if she were in a semiconscious trance.

  McBride stopped.

  I’ve seen this before somewhere.

  Dowd kept moving the images forward. The girl was in a dark room or a basement, looking into a rectangular shape placed on the outside wall of a small metal room; it was not clear what she was looking at, but in the next frame McBride caught a glimpse of the inside; through the rectangle she could see what looked like a stairway or corridor stretching into the wall. Countless consecutive reflections of the girl lost in infinity.

  Is that a mirror?

  Then the picture went black.

  “What happened?” they said, almost in unison.

  “It stops after that,” Dowd said. “It looks like someone was working on it, maybe digitizing it. I’m guessing that’s how far they got.”

  “The guy who works there? The one who disappeared?”

  “It would explain why it’s been left unfinished.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” McBride suddenly said, more to herself than anybody else. It didn’t make sense, though; it couldn’t.

  She went over to her desk and turned her computer on. She clicked on the folder containing the video evidence converted from the VHS exhibit of the 1980s case. She had to scroll through an endless array of video files. She eventually found it. A girl, around the same age, restrained on a chair, looking into a rectangular window—and inside, countless of her reflections stretching into nothingness. She had seen the girl’s face a thousand times, pored over it and others as part of case evidence. Her name was Katie Mitchell, last seen on Morrison Street sometime late afternoon on September 15, 1986. The video evidence from the old case—involving a victim of her perp—was almost identical to the bizarre secret frames in the film from the Archive. It was as if the person who made it had watched the old one and decided to remake it. The cases had seemed entirely unconnected until now.

  She turned to Johnson, who was talking with the others. The door flung open and a mass of fat hesitated at the threshold. A police constable stood with his eyes cast down—a sign that shouting had taken place before he came into the room. It didn’t take long for McBride to understand who had been doing the shouting.

  “Superintendent Breitner wants to see you,” he told no one in particular, but McBride knew it was her who was wanted.

  She got up and went to the door, from where she could hear the superintendent boiling.

  “McBride! My office—now!”

  —

  “I already told you what happened,” she said.

  “Then tell it to me again.”

  “I’m just looking to see if I find a nibble from this guy.”

  “Let it go.”

  The superintendent’s office was squeaky clean, except for his “frustration corner”; there, he seemed to adhere to the turmoil of the rest of the precinct: cabinets half-open, revealing piles upon piles of paperwork that would need t
o be neatly filed, ordered, and sent to some high-rank place. Superintendent Martin Breitner was a sizable man who walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter’s. He had a full head of thick black hair—no gray, no sign of dyeing. His facial features conformed to a geometry that made him seem like he was smiling, even now as he simmered in anger.

  D.S. Georgina McBride, arms crossed, was sitting in one of the two chairs across from his desk. Phone messages were stuck to the lower part of his monitor, probably the last hour’s worth. The office walls were adorned with framed newspaper articles of Breitner’s achievements: Tony Blair shaking his hand; some Dundee chief inspector he had saved during a hostage negotiation gone wrong; establishing the newest training center at the Scottish Police College for junior station inspectors. There were various plaques and badges for dedicated law enforcement, as well as a ribbon; McBride had never asked about the latter.

  His computer was up and running, and it had taken over his desk. The photo of his family had been moved to the far side of the desk and turned the other way, facing McBride.

  Problems at home, Martin?

  “I can’t.”

  “There is no connection between the two cases,” he said. “Every time you get like this…”

  “Which time?” She was waiting for him to mention the Sterger case, one of many in which the perpetrator had walked because of insufficient evidence. McBride had worked the case, and she had gone in too early.

  She bit her thumbnail, looking nervously behind her. “I have to get back out there. Perp’s still out there.”

  “I can hold you for as long as I want, Detective.”

  “You think I don’t use these tactics myself, boss?”

  He slammed his fist on the desk, rattling the keyboard and knocking the family picture onto the floor. “I know your tactics bloody well, Detective!” He straightened his tie and composed himself. “Did you tell the suspect that you would take his children away from him?” He made no effort to retrieve the picture.

  McBride sat there, blinking at him. “We’re turning every one of our cases into a witch hunt,” she finally said. “Now if you don’t mind, Superintendent, I’m busy.”

  “Not if I can help it.” He drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk, as if daring her to reply.

  “There’s another girl that’s disappeared,” she said.

  He nodded. “Amanda Pearson. She was last seen near Ocean Terminal in Leith.”

  “So much for change, huh?” McBride chuckled. Leith was brushing the dust off its shoulders. It was more than a scrub and a sweep; the corporate world had decided that a cultural and commercial embourgeoisement was in order: converted waterside flats, fashionable bistros, a concentration of Michelin stars, bars, and street culture. Yet the old seaman’s town was still there; sometimes you could hear its soft whisper from the water. “Things left behind are never things forgotten,” it whispered. Nowhere was this more evident than at the port’s old watering holes: floors tinted with drips of Guinness, swarthy figures with heavy fists crouched on barstools, palms wrapped around a pint. Their empty stares would linger on the front door, as if checking on the weather outside their sanctuary, while nearby, perhaps a dark figure was targeting little girls.

  “It might be connected to the girl we found at Covenant Close.”

  He threw his hands up. “There you go again with the conjecture.”

  “Let me talk to the girl’s parents.”

  The superintendent’s thickish brows rose outward from twin creases above his nose. “Have you been listening to what I’ve been saying for the past five minutes?”

  She sighed.

  “Stick to your case. We’ve got our hands full. There’s been some shady business at a film society in Newington.”

  “The Archive?”

  He nodded. “Half the building was in flames and one person’s missing. Suspect’s still out there. We’re still working on IDing him from the building’s security cameras.”

  “Let me help out, then. I’ll pay them a visit. You can talk to the girl’s parents.”

  “Someone else is on the case.”

  She hissed a breath through her teeth.

  “It’s the Sterger case all over again,” he said.

  “What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?” She made a motion to get up but sat back on her chair. “That case, I stood by it and worked it to the book. Played by the rules. And the guy walked.”

  “Look, McBride, I know your preference for these cases, and I know you genuinely want to help these victims. But you have to work within the channels. This means that sometimes the bad guy gets away.”

  “I’m not going to leave anybody behind.”

  “All I’m saying is, just take a leave for today, take it easy for a while. Go home, get some rest. Nobody is going to blame you for taking time off to clear your head.”

  “I don’t need this,” she said, on the verge of exploding, but Breitner silenced her with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head.

  “I’m not giving you a choice.”

  She snorted and rose out of her chair. She opened the door and paused. “You know what? Sometimes heads just have to roll.” She walked out of the office, slamming the door on her way out.

  21

  It had been an awful night.

  The mother went out to have some drinks; at first this only slightly alarmed Elliot. But then she returned, drunk, tripping on the steps to the door. To make matters worse, she wasn’t alone. There was someone with her, a young man he had never seen before. He was drunk, too, or appeared to be; these boys, you don’t know what the hell they’re up to—he might have been pretending just so he could get her into bed.

  Her speech was slurred and the things she was saying made no sense. Elliot was angry at her, for being a prospective whore, for not being able to restrain herself. How could she have betrayed him like this? He kept staring through the peephole for so long that his eye began to hurt. But he kept on; pain was not something he worried about.

  The door of her flat closed behind them, but he could still hear voices. Evidently, they were in her living room, joined by another voice. The door opened after a few minutes and the babysitter made her exit. The melody that excited him so much kept playing in his head.

  22

  On her living room television, a scene from a movie was on mute. Georgina McBride knew the story. This was the part where Shelley Duvall is forced to accept that her writer-husband has lost his marbles.

  McBride’s boiler system switched on, producing the sound of hell’s hammers from the pipes. The radiator next to her quivered as the valves trickled to life. It wasn’t half as cool-looking as the Overlook’s, but, damn it, it was safer.

  Onscreen, Duvall was expecting to see the beginnings of a novel as she flicked through pages her husband had been typing feverishly. Instead she read a single sentence, repeated over and over: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The Shining had been McBride’s favorite novel as a teenager; the film adaptation, not so much.

  She flicked the remote control and the television turned to standby. Was that the kind of person they were looking for? Did he use axes to crash through wooden doors? Did he talk to imaginary barmen?

  She got up from the couch, crossed to the other side of the living room, and placed her hand on the radiator. Too soon. Same ol’ Georgina McBride. Watching the pot that never boils; busting the crook who later walks.

  Her doorbell rang. She looked at the mess on the floor, then crossed into the hall. She tiptoed to the door as the bell rang again.

  There was a murmur. Fingers pushed the door’s mail slot open. Instinctively, she kept to the side of the door, back pressed to the wall, but then she realized how silly this was.

  “You sleeping it off?” a familiar voice said.

  She turned the bolt silently and yanked the door open. Guy Johnson, who had been peering through the mail slot, stood up.

  “You checking up on me?” she s
aid.

  He smiled at her from behind tired eyes. She knew he had five cases going to court next week and at least as many that needed to be filed and sent in some semblance of order by yesterday. Five cases of burglary, she recalled; one body at Covenant Close; one missing person at the Arch fire. He shuffled his feet and followed her indoors.

  “What’s the word, Guy? Is it going to be a busy day?”

  “It’s been pandemonium so far, and it’s not even noon.”

  She nodded consent. The CID was undermanned as it was, and the latest abduction was bound to make things even tougher.

  She offered him a beer, but he turned it down. She moved the magazines from an armchair and motioned for him to sit. She took the sofa for herself, tucking one leg underneath the other.

  “What’s happening with the Archive case?”

  “Breitner’s put me in charge,” Johnson said.

  “Meaning it’s your arse on a sling should there be a fuckup.”

  “Perish the thought, D.S. McBride. Which reminds me…” He opened his briefcase and pulled out two black folders. “Fresh off the press,” he laughed, handing them to her. He scratched the side of his chin, uneasy. “Let’s hope no one’s looking for them back at headquarters anytime soon.”

  The folders could prove to be a breakthrough. The print was her ally. With this, she could reconstruct things—movements, motives, thoughts. But even knowing what she was looking for, it would take time and effort. Her eyes were stinging, and she kept rubbing them, which only blurred her vision. She opened the first folder and skimmed through the documents. It was the typed incident report on the Archive investigation.

  “I don’t understand what makes you tick with this thing. Twenty-four hours ago you were hell-bent on the Covenant Close incident. Don’t tell me you’re trying to tie this in with your serial killer story. It hasn’t even been six hours since the fire at the Archive.”

  She didn’t acknowledge the question, just kept looking at the paperwork. “CCTV in the building yield anything?”

  “For some reason, there is an unaccounted-for gap in the CCTV recording. We suspect it might have been due to a power shortage.”