The Mayfly: The chilling thriller that will get under your skin

by James Hazel

  ‘And what has he deduced?’

  Priest took a deep breath. ‘She’s introverted, religious, intelligent but socially naive. She has a very small group of friends but none of them apparently know her particularly well and I suspect, apart from her various blogs – which are probably written for her own self-preservation rather than for anyone else’s benefit – she keeps herself to herself. And, like you, she’s single.’

  Jessica scowled.

  *

  The Creation Church was identified by a sign promising free entry to the Kingdom of Heaven for people who spread the Word. In reality, it was less of a church and more of a community centre. According to the pinboard in the foyer, the last event of any significance had been the Women’s Institute race night, two weeks ago.

  ‘This is it?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘Solly says this church is mentioned a number of times in Hayley’s blogs.’

  ‘I was expecting something more –’

  ‘Not all religions have the resources to build cathedrals, Jessica.’

  She turned up her nose. ‘A church with an IPA beer pump strapped to the reception desk?’

  ‘I bet Holy Communion is a most fulfilling experience here.’

  The interior was as tired as the exterior. A room of reasonable proportions, plastic chairs stacked in one corner, peeling white lines on the floor loosely delineating a badminton court. At the unmanned reception desk, one could pick up a copy of the Creation order of service or a pint of dark, sediment-filled ale – the choice was yours.

  A voice hailed them from across the room. They turned and saw a man in a dark suit standing in a doorway that led through to a small kitchen. He was younger than Priest, with a beard as dark as his clothes and heavy glasses. He was good-looking, slim and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a courtroom, were it not for the worried expression and awkward stance. Priest doubted that the Creation Church saw many unfamiliar faces, especially not ones dressed as stylishly as Jessica Ellinder. Priest hadn’t shaved, and probably looked as though he was more likely to be here for the beer than the homily.

  ‘Hello? Can I help you?’ the man asked.

  ‘My name is Charlie Priest; this is my associate, Jessica Ellinder.’ Priest held out his hand.

  The bearded man took it firmly. ‘Reverend Matthew,’ he offered.

  ‘Reverend?’ Jessica gestured to her throat, where the dog collar should be.

  He laughed nervously. ‘Oh, we don’t go in for that sort of thing round here, Ms Ellinder. We’re all equals, preacher and flock.’

  Jessica smiled and he relaxed a little.

  ‘We wonder whether you could help us, Reverend?’ said Priest.

  ‘Yes?’ Reverend Matthew narrowed his eyes a little, the first sign of defensiveness.

  ‘We’re private investigators,’ Priest explained. This was not a complete lie – essentially that was what many civil lawyers were.

  Matthew frowned. ‘I see.’

  ‘We’re looking for a young woman. Mid-thirties, long wavy blonde hair, reserved. A member of this church,’ Priest explained.

  ‘We have lots of those, Mr Priest.’

  ‘Her name is Hayley Wren.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Yes, Hayley is one of our regular attendants. One of our flock. Is she in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘But it’s important we find her.’

  Reverend Matthew faltered. He seemed to be debating something internally.

  Priest picked up on it. ‘As my colleague says, Reverend Matthew, it’s important we find Hayley as soon as possible. Can you help us with that?’

  ‘Who hired you?’ he asked. His cheeks were flushed and he looked more troubled than when he had first appeared at the kitchen door.

  ‘Hayley’s mother,’ Priest said.

  ‘Hayley – Hayley had no parents that I am aware of. They died in a car crash. That’s what she said.’ Reverend Matthew looked worried.

  ‘No,’ Priest corrected. ‘Her father is – was – the Attorney General.’

  ‘To be honest, I thought as much,’ Reverend Matthew said, as much to himself as to Priest or Jessica. ‘I suspected she had family ties. She was a very private person. Very inward. She would rather lie about her kin than admit to anything that might lead to questions being asked.’

  ‘Where is she, Reverend?’ Priest was beginning to feel uneasy. He took a step forward.

  Matthew glanced at Jessica and then back at Priest. He seemed to make a decision. ‘Come through,’ he invited.

  He ushered them into the kitchen, then through a locked door and into an office of sorts. There was an old cash register on the side next to a gambling machine, and a table took up most of the space. Cigarette trays lined every surface. Evidently, the smoking ban hadn’t quite penetrated the back room of the Creation Church. The stench was overpowering.

  ‘I’m afraid rates in the city centre are high,’ Matthew said. ‘This is the best we can do. We are hardly the Church of Scientology when it comes to fiscal resources.’

  ‘You don’t have to be apologetic, Reverend,’ Priest told him. They took seats – Priest and Jessica on one side of the table, Matthew on the other.

  ‘Sometimes we use this room for cleansing rituals,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Cleansing rituals?’ Jessica queried.

  ‘The Catholics call it confession,’ Matthew continued. ‘Although our version is more like an informal therapy. Come in and lift the weight of the world off your shoulders. In here, we give out advice and support to those who need it. We do not offer the hollow concept of forgiveness. We don’t promote guilt as a good thing.’

  Priest nodded. For a cleric, Matthew seemed pretty down to earth. And there was an integrity in his eyes that was impossible to dismiss but something else too – a fervent disquiet.

  ‘Was Hayley ever cleansed in this room?’ Priest asked.

  Matthew talked earnestly. ‘Yes. I heard her. It was about a week ago, I think. That was one of the first times I had really spoken to Hayley. I knew who she was, of course. She was here every week. I’d tried to communicate with her, tried to get her to engage, but she made it clear that she was happy sitting at the back. She just wanted to be part of the furniture. Sometimes it’s like that.

  ‘So I was surprised when she approached me. I might be able to pinpoint the exact day for you if I had my calendar with me. It was snowing outside, I think. Not heavily, but a sprinkling. The service was about conversion – always a tricky subject. It’s one that we handle very sensitively around here, you see. I used to be Catholic. And then I heard a sermon one day about how they hoped that terrorists would see the light of God and how Jesus would guide them to righteousness and I realised how stupid I had been. They were no different than the extremists – those middle-aged, self-congratulatory worshippers. They believed in something. They wanted others to believe in the same thing. They pitied people who didn’t. So, I left the Catholic Church and God guided me here. And what better place to start my campaign against the Devil? Amongst such squalor! Point is . . . we deal with conversion carefully. We don’t shove our religion down other people’s throats.

  ‘So that’s how I remember Hayley came to me after that sermon, because it was so unexpected. Usually I get a dribble of well-wishers followed by a larger dribble of busybodies saying we aren’t doing enough to bring new faces to the church after I had stood up for an hour and told them that it was not their prerogative to recruit new followers. That prerogative is His and His alone. But Hayley took me aside and asked if I would see her – cleanse her – there and then.’

  ‘How did she seem?’ Priest asked.

  ‘Agitated, upset. Something was bothering her enough to break her silence. So I got rid of everyone else and we came here, to this office, to talk.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘Not an awful lot, as it turned out.’ He paused and pinched his nose, trying to remember. ‘Let me see now. Sh
e asked me if I believed in evil. I said yes. She asked me whether there will be judgement over those that do wrong. I said, of course. God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.’

  ‘Ecclesiastes,’ murmured Priest.

  ‘Yes! Very few recognise this particular verse,’ Matthew exclaimed. ‘You must be a student of God.’

  Priest grimaced. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Go on, Reverend,’ Jessica prompted.

  ‘Anyway, that was how it was,’ Matthew continued. ‘She wanted reassurance about something and of course I don’t think it was anything to do with wanting reassurance about God’s will. I was being tested, to see if I could be trusted, perhaps. I’m not sure, but we went on like this for a while. Did I understand fear? To fear the Lord is to hate evil, I told her. Eventually I stopped her and asked what this was all about? Was she OK? Was she in any kind of trouble? She didn’t answer me but she did hand me something – an envelope – and explain that it had been posted through her door. It was significant to her, although she didn’t understand what it was. Did I? I’m afraid not. But I know one thing: what I saw in her eyes that day, and detected in her voice, was a terror unlike any other that I have borne witness to, and I’m sorry to say that I have not seen her since.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her since the meeting you spoke of?’ asked Jessica. ‘You said she attended every week.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew uneasily. ‘Without fail. Until now.’

  ‘What have you done to try and find her?’

  ‘What could I do? Nobody knows anything about her. I don’t even know where she lives.’

  Jessica shook her head, dissatisfied.

  ‘What was in the envelope?’ Priest asked.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ Matthew got up and went to a sideboard piled with papers. He rummaged around and, after a while, produced a small envelope, which he placed on the table in front of Priest. There was something inside. A bulge. Priest took the envelope in his hands and carefully opened the top, allowing the contents to fall out on to the table.

  His body stiffened and a chill ran through him.

  ‘I confess I didn’t immediately recognise it,’ said Matthew, ‘but I carried out some research and I believe it’s what is commonly known as a March brown mayfly.’

  27

  The promising sunlight that had welcomed them to Cambridge was fading fast and the first spots of rain began to splash on the pavement. The students running the river trips were busily covering their punts with tarpaulins. It wasn’t the season for punting anyway, and even the lightest of showers would dissuade the last few remaining visitors from a trip down the Cam. This time of year, Starbucks did a hell of a lot better trade than they did.

  Sarah had been wrong, Priest concluded. Hayley hadn’t been sucked into a dark world of apocalyptic Bible bashers. She had found peace in that ramshackle community centre. And the Reverend Matthew was the real deal. Priest had met too many profiteers, fraudsters and criminals to not recognise legitimacy when he saw it. Jessica, who had been ashen ever since the dead bug had hit the table, held a different view.

  ‘He did nothing. She was clearly in trouble and he did nothing!’ she declared.

  ‘He was as scared as she was,’ Priest pointed out. ‘Not everyone is a hero, Jessica.’

  ‘If this is the only community in which Hayley had any involvement, then she’s been missing for a week at least. Reverend Matthew and his made-up church could have done something.’

  ‘What could he have done?’

  ‘At the very least he could have filed a missing person report with the local police.’ She was becoming agitated, fiddling with the key to get the Range Rover started. Giant droplets of rain were bouncing off the roof now. They had to keep their voices raised just to be heard over the noise. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This situation is stressful.’

  Priest shrugged as if it was nothing. And it was. His head was elsewhere, trying to process more new information and deal with the residual distraction of yesterday’s blackout. Trying to piece together the last forty-eight hours was like trying to reconstruct a bag of shredding but with half the pieces missing.

  After a while, Jessica said, ‘The mayfly –’

  ‘They found the same thing in Miles’s throat, according to McEwen,’ Priest said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she confessed.

  ‘It’s a symbol.’

  ‘A symbol for what?’

  Priest clicked his tongue. ‘I don’t know.’

  What was it that Reverend Matthew had said? God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

  Priest plucked his phone out of his pocket and started filing through the numbers. He pressed one.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jessica asked, her voice quivering slightly.

  ‘She lived round here. We need to find out where.’

  ‘This is awful . . .’

  For an extraordinary moment, Priest thought she might be crying. He placed a hand on hers. Her body stiffened at his touch. He removed his hand.

  There was a muffled voice. Priest had forgotten about the phone call. He put it to his ear.

  ‘Priest?’

  ‘Solly.’

  ‘Hello, Priest.’

  ‘Can you get the IP address for the Facebook entries that Hayley Wren posted?’

  Solly laughed, although there was no genuine amusement in his tone. Solly never really laughed. He just made the noises that he heard other people emit when they found something humorous. Solly might be a genius, but he was incapable of understanding human emotion. He was a living android.

  ‘I already did.’ Solly gave an address. ‘I got the street and Land Registry office copies for all the houses on that street. One of them is registered to Sir Philip and Lady Wren.’

  Jessica fed the address into the Range Rover’s GPS and they headed east through the suburbs. There was a burning sensation in Priest’s stomach. He had a bad feeling about Hayley.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Jessica complained. At first he didn’t see what she was talking about until she nodded at his foot, which was tapping against the side of the car door. ‘It’s bloody annoying.’

  ‘Sorry, I do that, sometimes.’

  Fifteen minutes later they were ringing the doorbell of a mid-terrace, late-Victorian house on a street comprising mainly of student digs. With its high railings and bay windows, it was vaguely reminiscent of Sarah’s house.

  There was no answer. A look through the keyhole revealed a mountain of post heaped up against the door. A smell of scented candles drifted through the hallway. Priest tried the door. It was locked.

  ‘Did you ever knock down a door when you were with the police?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘One or two.’

  Priest looked up and down the street, No one around. He inspected the door. The wood was old; the lock original. He knew where the stress points on the door were and that a well-aimed kick would take the lock off with not too much trouble.

  ‘Stand back,’ he instructed.

  With one final glance up the street, and gripping the protruding wall for balance, he was about to kick when a voice cut through the rain.

  ‘She’s not in!’

  Priest and Jessica both swung around and looked up. A fellow in his thirties was hanging out of the second-floor window of the house next door. He was grinning inanely from ear to ear. With his body concealed by the old Victorian brickwork around the window, he looked like the Cheshire Cat.

  ‘She’s not in,’ he repeated.

  Priest didn’t need to stare into his eyes close up to recognise Hayley’s next-door neighbour was a junkie.

  ‘Have you seen her recently?’ Jessica called.

  ‘You police?’ The junkie was shouting to be heard above the rain.

  ‘Salvation Army,’ Priest replied.

  The junkie sniffed. Rain was now running down his greasy, black hair and into the empty flower b
ox on the sill. He didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. Then he was gone.

  Jessica swept her wet hair out of her eyes. She looked tired. ‘Salvation Army?’ she said sceptically.

  Priest shrugged.

  There was a sound of a door opening. The junkie was standing in his doorway, the grin still carved across his face. He wore a sleeveless vest that had seen better days and a pair of baggy chinos tucked into a pair of brown boots.

  ‘Sally Army, you said?’ He beckoned them in. ‘You lot gave me these boots last year.’

  *

  The junkie’s lounge looked as if a bomb had hit it. The floor was strewn with balls of tinfoil that Priest doubted had been used to wrap baked potatoes.

  Priest perched himself on a footstool. Jessica declined the bean bag offered to her and elected to stand at the side of the room. She peered around suspiciously, as if the room was haunted.

  Shortly, they were handed mugs of herbal tea – camomile for Jessica, green for Priest in the absence of Earl Grey – and were drying themselves in front of an old electric fire.

  Their host had identified himself as Binny. It was fortunate that he seemed to hold the Salvation Army in high regard.

  ‘’Ave we met before, then?’ Binny enquired. From underneath his chair he pulled a tray, out of which he began to roll himself a joint.

  ‘I think we have,’ said Priest smiling. ‘But it was a long time ago. How are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, better,’ Binny said. ‘Got myself a little job at the recycling centre, you know.’

  ‘I hear and I’m told you’re doing a very good job, too.’

  Binny smiled broadly and lit the spliff. The smell of marijuana took hold almost immediately.

  ‘So, what d’you want with that woman next door, then?’ asked Binny through a haze of intoxicating mist.

  ‘Hayley?’

  ‘Yeah. Her.’

  ‘She expressed an interest in becoming a Soldier.’

  ‘Really? You kiddin’ me.’ Binny wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

  ‘Don’t you think she would make a good recruit?’

  Binny thought about this in between drags. ‘Suppose so. Keeps herself to herself. You lot have to be talkative, don’t you?’