Purged

by Peter Laws

  A picture of Seth gazed out of the screen, as the windows rattled with rain. He was standing by a tractor, with one wellied foot planted on a shovel sticking deep into the ground. Lots of kids stood with their thumbs up behind him. He had a tight-eyed Bugs Bunny beam to his face, a wooden cross dangling over his Barbour.

  Matt clicked ‘print’.

  As the machine started to buzz into life another article caught Matt’s attention. It didn’t have a great deal of relevance to the case, but Seth was part of it so he read it anyway.

  He’d been invited to say prayers at the funeral of a local boy who drowned in Hemel’s Grand Union Canal one winter morning. He’d come along to one of Seth’s farming workshops, ‘and thoroughly enjoyed it’. The family asked him to pray at the funeral because he was the ‘only churchgoer they really clicked with’. Matt made a note of the date: 2002. It had happened a few weeks after Lydia’s suicide in the bath.

  It was a very depressing read. The type of article you stumble across when you’re relaxing in the coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon. When you decide to read the paper cover to cover and ‘get informed’ about the world, only to be reminded that the world is pretty shit and you wish you had bought Viz instead.

  The kid had crawled out alone onto the ice to retrieve the Spiderman glove he’d accidentally dropped from a bridge. But he was too heavy, and the ice cracked beneath him. Apparently two elderly ladies were walking and saw him scrambling to escape, clawing at the ice, but then it collapsed and swallowed him completely. The horrified women didn’t know what else to do. They had no mobile phones. So instead they called for help as they followed the red smear of his ski jacket as it slid on the current down the river. There was one chilling little detail. ‘At one point we saw his little hands, still under. One with a glove on, one without, banging and pushing on the wrong side of the ice. But it was too thick for him to push through. I’ve had nightmares about that, and I reckon I always will.’

  Other than call down a jogger with a phone there was little the ladies could do, except walk along with that red smear and watch. The boy finally surfaced half a mile down, where the ice had thinned out. He bobbed up on his back, face looking up. Dead and blue-looking. He floated a few more metres before the hood of his parka jacket got tangled in the branches of a low-hanging tree. It kept the corpse there until help arrived. A dog-walker tried to reach for him, but it was way too far, and the jogger told him to stop; that people die when they jump in. So they, and the ladies, watched him floating there for a full five minutes until help came.

  So the family invited Cardle to the funeral, to say a few words and pray. There was no picture of Seth in this, though. Just the boy himself, alive and upright. Matt rolled the mouse near the kid’s little face. It was a school photo, with the requisite awkward smile. The dead boy was only seven years old, but old enough to be self-conscious about showing his teeth. He kept them covered with puffed-out lips.

  Matt sighed and took a sip of his tea.

  Print.

  But it was the final article, at the bottom of the list, that stopped Matt crunching through the Jammy Dodger in his mouth. It was from March 2004, a couple of years after Lydia’s suicide. Interestingly it was another drowning, but one far more connected to Seth himself.

  Caretaker Cleared of Drowning Church Cat

  Farmer Seth Cardle, and part-time caretaker of Hemel’s Light of God Christian Church, has denied accusations from a congregation member that he drowned Jinx, the church cat. Bessie Major (77) claimed to police that she arrived at the chapel at the end of January to arrange the flowers when she saw Mr Cardle (50) wrapping the deceased wet body of Jinx in a plastic bin liner. She accused the widower of drowning it, on account of the splashing and animal screams she claimed she had heard. Cardle insisted that the cat had fallen into the open baptistry and drowned after snagging its collar. He had been filling the baptistry pool for the Sunday service.

  Another member of the congregation backed up Mr Cardle’s account and eventually Bessie Major withdrew her accusation. She wrote an apology letter to Mr Cardle last week and was keen to set the record straight. In it she stated that she had been depressed about an upcoming doctor’s appointment on the night the cat died. She suggested that her raised levels of stress had contributed to her confusion that night. Cardle accepted the apology with good grace, and the curious case of Jinx the cat has finally been closed.

  Matt sat staring at the screen.

  The only noise in the room was the rattling gutter, the pounding rain and the sound of his own breath growing quicker as he read the article again. Then he read it a third time. Matt leant back in his chair and blew out a long low breath.

  Print.

  The door creaked open and Maggie leant in. ‘Have you found what you’re looking for?’

  ‘Quite possibly, yes.’

  The printer buzzed its mad rhythms. He pulled out a sheet and swung his chair in her direction. Over her shoulder he saw Ryan, the miserable librarian from before. He was in the kitchen opposite, slowly turning his spoon in a plain white mug of coffee, staring down into it for much longer than necessary.

  ‘Don’t you dare go using all the milk again, Ryan,’ she called back over her shoulder.

  ‘I just need one more favour,’ he said. ‘Do you keep records of the books people borrow?’

  ‘Um, yes. We’re a library.’

  ‘Ha … quite right.’ He threw her a charming smile, which seemed to bounce right off her concrete face. ‘How far back do those records go?’

  ‘Decades. Longer.’

  ‘So if I was to give you some names, you could tell me if they were members of this library and, more importantly, what books they borrowed? It might be worth a pop … while I’m here.’

  She frowned at him, ‘Are you a policeman?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘A university professor. I teach at Goldsmiths in London. And this is actually some very important research I’m doing here. So I really appreciate you helping me out like—’

  She tutted in such a loud, mocking, derogatory way that it cut him off dead. She’d been perfecting that cap gun snap sound for decades, no doubt. He spotted the wedding ring on her finger and had a vivid picture pop in his head. Of him and Ryan sharing a pub beer with Maggie’s husband. Putting a hand of commiseration on his shoulder and telling him to hang in there, mate. She said, ‘No, no, no way.’

  ‘Just a couple of names. It’s important.’

  ‘Don’t you have the Data Protection Act in Higher Education?’ she said. ‘Do not ask again, because it’s not happening. You’re an academic, so you should know better. Now, are you finished with the computers?’

  Matt hesitated then nodded at the half-eaten biscuit. ‘Not just yet.’

  She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ Then she marched back out to the main library, but not before leaning into the kitchen and whispering, ‘Do not leave crumbs, Ryan. Do you hear me? The ants … remember?’

  Ryan waited till she was long gone before he emerged, cup in hand.

  ‘Fun is it …’ Matt said, trying his luck, ‘… working for Hitler?’

  Ryan smirked and set his coffee back on the counter. ‘So tell me … which names do you want to look up?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Ryan tapped the computer keyboard with machine gun speed, while Matt hovered near the door on lookout. It didn’t take him long for Ryan to spin his chair around. ‘Okay. There’s nothing on Seth Cardle. He was never a member with us.’

  ‘Fine. Try Christopher Kelly.’

  ‘Address?’ Ryan said, as he span back.

  ‘119 Kellaway Rise, Hemel.’

  The keys clicked again as Matt watched an old man with a hump slowly passing the corridor, shuffling toward Non-Fiction and wincing a lot.

  ‘Got him,’ Ryan said. ‘Take a look.’

  Matt grabbed a chair and rolled it over.

  ‘Right … there’s y
our man,’ Ryan started waving the mouse cursor around. ‘It says here that his card’s still active.’

  ‘So he’s still using this library?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Do you cancel your library card when you move?’

  He thought about it. ‘Never.’

  ‘Exactly. He hasn’t taken anything out, in’ – he squinted at the screen – ‘four years.’

  ‘That makes sense. That’s when he moved from here, I think. And you have a list of what he borrowed?’ Matt wasn’t entirely sure why he was asking this. But he was in a library, with books on the shelves, and he’d been working in the university long enough to know that the books students borrow could often give unique glimpses into their character.

  ‘I can’t see Mein Kampf, if that’s what you’re thinking, though I guess Maggie has that on permanent loan.’ Ryan’s laugh sounded like a series of awkward sneezes. ‘But I’ll print them out. You’ll have to pay for the paper, though, or she’ll probably slit my throat.’ He clicked a button and the printer started again. He pulled the sheet and handed it to him. ‘The ones that have an “O” symbol next to them means we had to order those in from the bigger libraries. For the most part, though, it seems like he was into biographies.’

  Matt ran his eyes down the list. Chris might have lived in Hemel for over ten years, but there weren’t many books on there. A few cookbooks, Slow Cooking the Easy Way, 100 Things to do with Chicken, Budget Grub. He also must have been swatting up on some theology, long after he’d left college, because one of the more recent, ordered-in books was St Augustine’s Confessions. Heavy.

  Matt remembered reading that in the second year of Bible college. Sitting on the sill of his room late into the night, wading through the sticky drag of the writing style then suddenly falling into its flow.

  But Ryan was right. Most of the list was made up of biographies of famous people.

  Matt started to read them out, sounding like an announcer at a very weird and eclectic party. ‘Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, King Charles II, Emperor Constantine and … Wallace Stevens? Dutch Schultz?’ Matt frowned. ‘I don’t recognise those last two names. Do you?’

  ‘Wallace Stevens was a poet. American I think. Died in the 50s.’

  ‘And Dutch Shultz?’

  ‘Cartoonist maybe? Let me Google him.’ He started clicking again and the answer flicked up instantly. ‘Okay. He was a New York gangster. Died in 1935. A bootlegger. Organised crime. That sort of stuff.’

  ‘That’s a bizarre mix of people,’ Matt said. He leant into his chair, staring at the printout.

  Oscar Wilde? That was an especially odd choice. It was pretty safe to assume that Chris was still against homosexuality. He certainly had been at college. God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve! he once said, as if a rhyming couplet was enough to close the case on the matter. So why would he be reading the biography of someone so blatantly in that lifestyle?

  Ryan suddenly looked up from the screen. ‘Found it. They do have a link.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘They’re all dead.’ The squeak-sneeze laugh was back.

  Matt gave a sarcastic smile. ‘I was hoping for something a little more specific.’

  ‘I can dig a bit deeper into these people, if you like. See if there’s a link between them.’

  ‘That’d be great, but I don’t want to get you in any—’

  ‘I’ll help you because that’s what librarians do,’ he said. ‘Plus she wouldn’t want me to. So I will.’

  Matt checked his watch. ‘Tell you what. Here’s my card. I’d appreciate you looking into them. It’s probably pointless. But sometimes it’s worth pushing any door that comes your way. And Ryan … thanks for this. It’s actually very important.’

  He took the card from his hand and flicked it with his finger before slipping it in his pocket. ‘I’ll do my best.’

  Matt left the room and headed back through the library. The old guy with the Quasimodo back was reaching for a book at the top shelf, gasping, so Matt leant over and grabbed it for him. A doorstep-thick overview of the career of Benny Hill.

  ‘Much obliged,’ the man said, licking his lip.

  Maggie was sticking loose pages into a pile of kids’ books at the counter. Matt slapped a ten-pound note in front of her. ‘For the ink and the biscuits … and for your kindness.’

  Maggie didn’t answer him. She was too busy holding the ten pounds up to the light to check if it was fake. Then she counted his pages, sighed and pushed the tenner through a slot in a black tin. When she handed him five pounds and some change back, he couldn’t resist lifting the note to the light and checking to see if it was legit.

  ‘Can’t be too careful, these days,’ he said.

  She glared at him.

  He smiled and headed to the door and almost immediately stopped smiling as soon as he stepped outside.

  No running this time, Matt.

  It was time to go back to Hobbs Hill, and to the police that were searching for him. If he spent too long away he really was going to look like, as his mother put it, a dodge-pot. Besides, he wanted to talk to Seth Cardle and hopefully Chris again, before he called Miller.

  He headed outside into the rain, clutching the printouts that spoke of drowned cats, bathroom suicides, bootlegging gangsters and Oscar Wilde. And for one desperate second he could clearly visualise Miller sifting through all these documents and laughing right into his face. In the murder evidence Top Trumps, old biographies of Emperor Constantine had seriously fewer points than a missing girl’s golden tooth showing up on your drive, inside a dead fox’s throat that you happened to have killed.

  But still, Matt kept the papers tight and close under his jacket as he rushed to the car, refusing to let them get hit by a single drop of rain.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Matt once worked with a psychology lecturer called Roy Hansen who insisted that reactions like disgust were driven purely by the mind. Once he’d excitedly pulled Matt into his office and opened up a plastic sandwich tub on a small uncluttered desk he’d set up. The tub was filled with something brown. Roy pushed it closer to Matt and told him to ‘sniff deep the smell of dung’.

  ‘Clear your mind of all negative thoughts,’ he’d said, eyes closed. ‘Now imagine that you’re smelling a hot plate of lasagne. I mean, really visualise it. Go all Saint Ignatius on it. Now … tell me that your reaction doesn’t change. It’s sort of a nice smell, when you think about it that way.’

  Now that Matt was back near Hobbs Hill, drawing close to Seth Cardle’s farm, the fetid stench seeping through the cracks in the car was already starting to turn his stomach. And no amount of positive thinking was making it smell like anything other than dirty cow shit.

  At least the rain hadn’t followed him from Hemel. Back here the sun was still sharp and on duty, firing down its vitamins.

  He spotted the sign for Helston Farm on the hill.

  When Matt turned the car, his phone slid off into the footwell but he didn’t stoop to grab it. He didn’t care much for being near that thing, right now. There had been one more missed call from Miller but, again, no message. The printouts fell off too. The newspaper reports, the library books, the web search he did on Seth Cardle so that he could find the exact address of his farm. It was located about two miles out of Hobbs Hill, in the navel of a huge green belly of curved fields. Not that far from Tabitha Clarke’s house, he noticed.

  Larry had been in touch to confirm the suicide of Lydia Kelly in that cold little bathroom in Kellaway Rise. But the coroner’s report had an extra bit of information that the local papers didn’t mention. They’d found bathwater in her lungs. It was put down to her struggling in the bath, accidentally swallowing as she writhed about. Whatever the case, she’d been under the water.

  That cracked tile in the old farmhouse suggested that Tabitha Clarke had probably been under too. Then there was this business with Jinx the cat, dead in the baptistry and of course the little kid who drowned in the
canal. He couldn’t get the idea of it out of his head.

  ‘Water, water everywhere,’ he whispered to himself. When he finally ran into Miller again, he’d suggest (like Taylor had) that they send a team of divers into that lake, if they hadn’t started already. That and check those crematorium records.

  Larry also said that Chris Kelly had come back with no criminal record. The odious youthworker Billy Stephenson also turned out to be similarly clean. Seth Cardle had a string of traffic offences but, other than that, nothing of any major concern.

  The road to Seth’s farm was made of packed-in dirt from all the lorries and tractors that must have pounded up and down it every week. He’d planned on visiting Seth to get some answers but what he didn’t expect to see was a gang of about twelve protesters. They stood by the huge wooden gate, looking lobotomy-level bored. As soon as they spotted his car they sprang to their feet. Placards with miserable-looking pigs and squashed chickens flicked up everywhere. They started to punch the air with the images.

  ‘Stop the Helston Horror! Stop the Helston Horror!’

  Matt slowed the car as they all zombie-swarmed around it. He buzzed the window down and was sorely tempted to tell them that, yes, he’d love his windows washed, but he had the feeling they wouldn’t take the joke. One of them had a ginger beard, but brown hair. How was that even possible?

  ‘I need to get through.’

  ‘Not until you know the sort of business you’re supporting,’ the beard guy said. ‘Charlotte? Get over here.’

  A young woman with vintage sunglasses perched in her bleached blonde hair came over. She licked her thumb to pull out a leaflet.

  ‘Actually,’ Matt said. ‘I’m not here on business. I’m doing some work with the Metropolitan Police.’