Truth or Die

by Katerina Diamond

  The house was dark, even in the day, the woodwork all stained ebony, accompanied with dark blue embossed wallpaper. He flicked the switch and the hall light came on, barely illuminating the space. He remembered when he’d come to live here after his parents had died; it had reminded him of a haunted house ride that his father had taken him on at a theme park in America. Those days of freedom were a hazy memory – moving here was like being put in prison. The bad feeling ran through to the foundations; each floorboard that creaked sounded like a distant voice crying out for him to run away as fast as he could. He could never have anticipated how much evil was in this place, how much evil he would have to endure. Nature or nurture, Parker was a product of both. He would make sure at least that his child had a better chance in life. All he could do was hope the child would turn out like Abbey.

  Every time he came to this house, he was a different person to the time before. Last time he’d come looking for revenge; this time he was looking for answers. The stairs groaned under his feet in the same way they always had done, the song composed of his childhood. Upstairs he switched the lights on to see an even darker, longer corridor with a large black rectangle at the end – his bedroom door. A child’s refuge, place of solace, somewhere to seek comfort and rest. Or so it should have been.

  As he drew closer, he saw the familiar metal bar across the door, the large steel padlock that his grandfather had installed. Locked in every night, bars on the window, never quite sure if the door would be opened again, sometimes even praying it wouldn’t be. Comforted by the fact that he might be left to die, alone, without malice or fear. Abuse and neglect to the extreme. Those thoughts and feelings flooded Parker’s mind inside these walls. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside the bedroom, not this time, not today. Some people moved on from pain, some people couldn’t. Parker carried his pain with him, he couldn’t imagine being without it. It was almost reassuring to him.

  Parker opened the office door and turned the computer on. It had been a while since he had been in here, but everything was still working. After a few moments of inconsequential updates, the start screen finally appeared. He logged onto the virtual private network and secured his browser before he started to look up the people whose names he knew, researching both Exeter and Bristol university staff to see if there were any cross connections. He had spent a lot of money fortifying this system; these computers were protected by layers of security and encryption. No one knew about this house, not even Abbey, so he could conduct his investigation without disturbance. He found Helen Lassiter’s home address. He had exhausted his search in Bristol – everywhere led to a dead end or a dead student. His search always ended in one place though: Exeter University. He had found out that Robert Coley used to work in Exeter, and that he still had family in the area and ties to the community. He didn’t matter any more though – he was dead.

  Parker scribbled down the information that he needed and went back downstairs. A police siren whizzed past the window and he briefly caught his breath. They wouldn’t find him here; this house had been in the family for generations and his now dead grandfather was even less fond of the authorities than Parker had been. It was registered under a trust and had no named connection to the family at all. If the police looked it up, the owner was a local solicitor who had strict instructions not to disclose who the real owners were. Of course, when the property changed hands and Parker inherited the house, he had to pay restitution to the solicitor to keep the arrangement in place. He knew it wouldn’t be an issue, as any person his grandfather was dealing with was more than likely corrupt and so all he had to do was find out where the corruption was and make sure the solicitor knew he was aware. As it happened, the solicitor was more than happy to take the bribe even without the threat of exposure, although Parker was sure that didn’t hurt.

  The kitchen had Italian marble floors in black-and-white tile and a deep French grey on the bespoke units. The conservatory backed onto the kitchen and the blocked stained glass was the only real colour in the room. The cupboards were full of the same crockery his grandfather had left behind. He found a tin of tomato soup and opened it, drinking the contents cold and straight from the can. He had no desire to stay in this room any longer than necessary, but he was hungry; late nights and lack of sleep were catching up to him. He saw the knife block by the side of the sink and instinctively rubbed the silky line on the back of his hand. The gash in the oak worktop was still there from when his grandfather had driven a knife through his hand and pinned him there to punish him for drinking a second glass of water. Grandfather was all about discipline.

  Parker left the kitchen with a full stomach – an unusual feeling for him in this house. He turned the hall lights off again, wanting to soak in the feeling of the house in the dark, no longer afraid of it now that he had been inside for a while. The silence confirmed that he was the only occupant and that his grandfather was indeed dead. Even though he had been gone for several years now, his presence in this house was a constant. Every time Parker walked into a room here, he half expected his grandfather to be sitting there. When he was still alive, Parker had sometimes crept through the building at night when his grandfather had fallen asleep before remembering to lock him in his room. He knew every corner, every scuff on the floorboards, every loose thread on the rugs. He would return to his room before his grandfather awoke, too afraid to run away.

  He would sleep on the sofa tonight; he couldn’t sleep in the bedroom, the upstairs felt particularly haunted and while he had his wits about him right now it was manageable, but when he woke in the middle of the night, which he often did, then it became another matter altogether. The nightmares Parker had in this house were not nightmares, they were memories, even worse than most people could comprehend. Anyone who had been involved was now dead and the secrets of this house were deep inside Parker; though sometimes he felt as though the house were trying to pull them out again, make him relive it all.

  He lay down and closed his eyes, focusing on the ticking grandfather clock in the alcove next to the bay window. He thought about Abbey and the baby they were due to have, the fear of passing on his genetic material, his deep-rooted badness, a real fear. He hoped that there was enough good in Abbey to override that. She made him a better person. She had always supported him and never made him feel like the monster he always imagined he was. Abbey was the light to his darkness. He tried to focus on his love for her and not the other feeling he was so desperate to ignore. It was excitement – excitement that he was hunting again, excitement at the prospect of killing again. He thought his anger would end with the death of the people who’d hurt him, but when they were gone the anger had stayed. There were other bad people though, other injustices he could avenge, other evils he could extinguish. His abusers had always told him he was rotten on the inside, maybe they were right. The malevolent whispers of the house lulled Parker to sleep, preparing him for the day tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Two weeks ago

  It was easy breaking into Helen Lassiter’s house. She had no security to speak of; not many people in this part of the country did. They felt safe without it. Helen’s house was empty, the kind of empty that indicated a holiday and not just a day at work. There were letters piled up on the welcome mat. Parker picked them up and looked through them, but there was nothing particularly interesting. He went through the house room by room. He found her computer and turned it on. Lots of photos, her work calendar – she was away on a school trip to Johns Hopkins University in America, the leading university in the study of genetics and molecular biology. She wouldn’t be back for over another ten days.

  Frustrating as that news was, it meant Parker could spend time in her house without fear of detection. He went through every document folder and file in her computer, but there was really nothing suspect on there. He looked through the photographs of various school trips and conferences, away days and team-building exercises. Certainly nothing of any note. Each fol
der was labelled with a date and name of the occasion. The only folder that didn’t have a detailed label was one called Hibiscus.

  Parker opened the folder to find lots of photos of Hawaiian hibiscus flowers. Helen Lassiter didn’t seem like the kind of person who would particularly be into tropical flowers. Her house was very neutral, almost monochrome. He looked into the properties of each picture; he needed to figure out the key. He could tell this was basic steganography – the art of concealing hidden messages inside files in order to avoid suspicion when handing the messages from person to person. It wasn’t a particularly accomplished computing skill, you could get apps that helped you cover and uncover the messages and Parker had no doubt he would get inside them eventually. He looked through her desk and found an address book with passwords and codes scribbled inside it, clumsily scribbled between the details of actual contacts. He tried several but to no avail. It was a long shot, but he tried the same word he had used on Robert Coley’s computer: Chimera. The files unlocked. Another unimaginative genetics professor.

  The files contained correspondence between four of the lecturers going back several years: notes from Robert Coley, Helen Lassiter, Hugh Norris and Gillian Mitchell. There was another person whose name was left out of all correspondence – it was definitely a man, but apparently he would only speak in person about what they were doing. They each had a candidate and the professors were toying with their pupils, literally – manipulating them into a game of sorts. Parker couldn’t figure out exactly what the stakes were, but it was obvious that the candidates were given risky assignments and for each assignment completed without complication and with evidence, the professors would gain points. The riskier the assignment, the more points the professors got. A fantasy psycho league. There were points for graffiti, points for stealing exam papers or important school trophies, points for intimate relations with certain untouchable professors, points for hurting people. There was something unspoken, too. The code speak they used was rudimentary at best, but to gain the biggest points of all there was a specific task: murder. Suicide was a deduction in points, and murder was the greatest point scorer of all. There were basically points for everything. Robert Coley was trying to recruit Abbey to be his candidate, to manipulate her into doing crazy things in order to win points for him. He had backed the wrong horse.

  As Parker delved further into the details of the files, he was shocked to find that not only had this been going on for years, but it had gotten more extreme, with these people trying to outdo each other. He read through the correspondence and saw that they picked high-risk students with low entry grades, ones who had more to lose, and then leveraged something against them. With Abbey, it would have been something to do with the sexual assault. How low do you have to be to do something like that for entertainment? That’s all it was to them, entertainment. There was no purpose here. They had tried to justify it under the guise of some sociological experiment, but it wasn’t that, it was fun and games, nothing more. He had read about the Milgram studies on obedience and other experiments where children were taken to summer camps and forced to attack each other with knives, all trying to find out how far you could push a person against their own moral code. The success of these experiments lay in the small increments: start with something small, then build up to the big stuff. Many years later it had been discovered that many of the results had been falsified to prove the hypothesis, but that was less widely known; they left it out of the textbooks.

  He had known people like this, he had killed people like this. You never heard about this kind of thing happening in the lower classes, it was always something that happened among the more affluent and educated people. People who thought they were better than anyone else. Before he had exacted his revenge, he had studied this kind of predatory behaviour. For, while he could understand one person deciding to kill someone, he wondered how these people met each other, how they approached each other and invited new members into the fold.

  He read through the night, making notes in his black leather notebook, jotting down names and places. Although the names of the four professors were listed, the names of the students weren’t. On its own this wasn’t enough evidence for the police, but it was enough for Parker, enough to condemn them all. Tomorrow he would go and observe these professors and decide what to do next.

  In the morning, Parker got up early. He had to think ahead. If he got caught by the police before he finished, then Helen Lassiter would go unpunished. There was a chance they would catch him and he had to be prepared for that. It was unclear from Helen Lassiter’s correspondence whether she had been complicit in the sexual assault Abbey had endured at Exeter University. Had it been part of her game? Had she won points for what happened to Abbey? Had she told those boys to assault her? He wanted to ask her outright, but she wasn’t here. Was he just reading between the lines and seeing things that weren’t there? From what he could see, there was a chance, and with the way he felt about Abbey, that chance was enough. To break someone for sport was not a new concept, but the collusive nature of the game made Parker feel sick. It always amazed him that wicked people could find others like them. He couldn’t risk letting her get away with it.

  The pipes that led to the boiler were in the back of a corner cupboard. Parker pulled a wrench out of his backpack and started to loosen them. He grabbed some fairy liquid and smeared it on the edge, waiting for the tiny bubbles to appear, showing that there was a tiny hole where gas could escape. Hopefully the gas would build up enough before she returned, she wouldn’t even know. He couldn’t bank on the police not catching him before she returned and he knew she had to die, she was getting off easy though.

  He walked from Helen Lassiter’s place, making sure that no one saw him leave over the back fence. He had downloaded a map of the inside of the university and found out the internal layout. He marked Hugh Norris and Gillian Mitchell’s offices. He was going to find out what he could about them.

  When Parker arrived at the university, the sun had not yet risen, and the day was just beginning. The doors to the humanities block were unlocked, but it was a good three hours until lessons began. Parker slipped inside and walked through the halls, getting his bearings. The light to Doctor Norris’s office was on. Parker made sure he was not seen before he knocked on the professor’s door. There was no answer. He turned the handle and the door clicked open; he slipped inside.

  When Parker turned around, he was confronted with the sight of blood, a lot of blood. He assumed the blood belonged to the body on the floor and he assumed that body belonged to Doctor Norris. It was hard to tell because his face had been obliterated. It looked fairly fresh and so it had happened in the last few hours. Who had done this? Was this part of the game? Or was this something else? Was there another person like Parker at work here, trying to ascertain the truth and dishing out retribution? He didn’t know any of the answers, but he did know he had a limited amount of time now. The police would be involved soon.

  Parker looked around the room for a computer, as it might have more information about who was in charge, but the computer wasn’t here. He needed to find the other students before they were forced to commit any other crimes and asking Norris was no longer an option, so he searched in the drawers for any clues. He tried not to disturb the room too much, knowing the forensic scientists would be going over the place with a fine-tooth comb. Whoever committed this murder did a sloppy job.

  He moved slowly and methodically through the room, making sure he didn’t touch anything that had blood on it. He didn’t want to transfer any blood to anywhere else. It was too difficult, and time was ticking on. He was angry with the person who left this mess. He couldn’t do his job if things like this happened. Whatever their motivation was, whoever did this had made things more difficult for Parker. Or maybe he just couldn’t admit to himself that he had been looking forward to confronting Norris. Maybe it wasn’t about finding things out at all, maybe it really was all about the killing. He still
had one shot left with Gillian Mitchell. She could prove to be the key to the case. He would follow her and watch for a while, from a distance.

  Norris’ death was bound to stoke up some frantic embers. He had to get out of there before someone walked in and discovered the body. He opened the door a sliver and looked into the hall. He could hear the clopping of heels approaching. Holding his breath, he waited for the woman to pass, hoping she wouldn’t try to enter the office. He didn’t want to hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. A minute later and she was gone. She might tell the police that she saw the professor’s light on, but other than that she’d have seen nothing. He slipped out as quickly as he had slipped in, no one any the wiser. There was no CCTV inside these buildings.

  As he was walking down the hill and out of the uni, he saw one of the maintenance staff unblocking one of the outside drains. He needed to get himself some blue overalls.

  Chapter Thirty

  Present

  Imogen pulled the burned toast out of the toaster. It didn’t matter what number she put it on, it always burned. It wasn’t like it was the toaster’s fault either; this was the third one she had bought. It was definitely something about her that was causing the problem. She felt Adrian’s hands on her hips as he pulled her into an embrace, and she leaned back into him and huffed.

  ‘I like it burned, it’s good for you,’ Adrian said.

  ‘I’m pretty sure it’s bad for you, actually.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, I’m not that hungry anyway.’

  ‘Who says it was for you?’ She threw it in the bin onto four other slices of black toast.

  ‘Do you want me to make you some toast?’ Adrian offered.