Déjà Vu

by Stephen Edger

  But the surface beneath her was uneven, and she soon lost her footing, and tumbled forwards towards the abyss, feeling a sharp hot pain in her left wrist as it collided with the rough leaves and stones of the ground. And it was all she could do to stop her face smashing into the cold mud too, as she put out a protective right arm parallel to her face, her elbow taking the brunt.

  And as the pain in her wrist grew, she instinctively knew it was sprained or fractured, and she so desperately wanted to let out a shriek of pain, but she choked it down, willing the pain to go inwards and restart her race.

  And as she remained low – a crumpled mess on the sinking floor – she could only pray that he hadn’t heard her. But then a twig snapped off to the left somewhere behind her, and it was all the incentive she needed. Roaring forwards again, she no longer cared how much noise she was making. He had to know where she was anyway, so what was the point in trying to hide it. This was no longer about hiding, and all about escaping. If she could just run fast enough and hard enough, she might just be able to put sufficient distance between them.

  More twigs snapped.

  Closer this time.

  Just out of reach.

  He was closing.

  But she wasn’t ready to give in. She’d come too far for that, and as she narrowly avoided a tall tree, directly ahead of her, she quickly turned twenty degree to the right, hoping he wouldn’t notice and would continue straight to widen the gap.

  Another tree fizzed past, and then another, and another.

  She was definitely in the forest proper now; the ground was more solid, and she was making better strides forward. She wasn’t sure if she could still hear him, but didn’t dare turn back. To do so would waste precious time and potentially cause her to miss the threat of another stray branch or stump.

  And then just as all hope was fading, she spotted a yellow light ahead. Too bright to be the moon or a star. It was a beacon of some kind calling to her. If she could just make it to the property, then maybe she would find some way of defending herself, or calling for help. Or better still, locking her pursuer outside where he could no longer hurt her.

  A second yellow light appeared, and then another. Still too small to light the pathway, but she could feel the scratching branches to her sides thinning, and the floor becoming less unsteady. A clap of thunder startled her, and in doing so, she misplaced a foot, and was hurtling forwards again, but she pushed her head up, straining every muscle in her lower back and willing herself to stay upright. It worked – just – as the knuckles of her good hand scraped the ground, but she was still moving forwards.

  And now fresh drops of rain were falling all around. Thick, heavy drops, which soaked her clothes through in seconds, and made running difficult once more.

  But the rain would be impacting his movement too.

  A fourth light, and then a fifth. Windows. Definitely windows.

  The end was in sight.

  Five windows meant a house rather than a lodge. A house might mean phone and weapons. And food. Oh how she could devour a sandwich in that moment. She couldn’t remember her last meal, but the growling in her stomach was growing louder, demanding sustenance

  If only she could get inside before him.

  Yes, there it was: a door. So close now. Only metres between her and salvation. She had to keep going, even as her lungs burned from exhaustion and every fibre reeled from lactic acid. Just a few more steps. She could do this.

  And as the door to the property came closer, she could see it opening. Opening for her. Like some invisible force was watching out for her, beckoning her to make the finish line.

  But she had to know how close he was. So close to safety, and she had to look back.

  Willing her feet not to slow, and begging her head not to peer back over her shoulder, she was powerless to prevent her curiosity.

  And that’s when he came racing out of the woods, bathed in the light emanating from the open door.

  A man.

  Rain dripping from his dark hairline, but his face little more than a blur through the heavy storm. He was coming.

  He was coming for her.

  And he was going to catch her.

  There was nothing she could do. The house was too far, and he ate up the ground between them. She just had time to look back at the doorway and the warm orange glow welcoming her, when she felt him leap through the air and crash onto her back. And then she was tumbling onwards once more, only this time the ground didn’t immediately come up to meet her.

  Still she fell, her legs and arms flailing through the never-ending darkness, until she thumped the damp mud. She felt her ribs crack, and it was all she could do to rollover to catch a glimpse of her attacker.

  He stood several feet above her, his faceless shadow blocking out the light from the house. And as she tried to ask why, she didn’t have the chance as a shovelful of mud fell through the rain landing on her face, and the sour taste entering her mouth.

  She stretched one final arm out, screaming at the top of her lungs, hoping somebody would hear and save her from the watery grave.

  Megan’s heart pounded in her chest as she stared up at the stained ceiling. The mud was gone. The grave was gone. The man was gone.

  Sitting up on the sofa she felt trapped in the limbo between sleep and reality.

  Her breath was in short, sharp bursts, her forehead dripping with sweat, and her arms aching, as if she had just run a marathon.

  She knew what she needed to do. Whoever was doing this to her – whether a gift bestowed by a spirit or not – she had a responsibility to find out who the man was and why he wanted her dead. Reaching for the yellow exercise book, she turned to a clean page and began to scribble every fleeting moment of the nightmare, before it permanently escaped her mind.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Based on what they had learned over the last forty-eight hours, Carlos had killed himself as he could no longer live with the trauma of losing his only son more than a decade ago. It wasn’t an unbelievable theory, even if Jake wasn’t convinced that was the whole truth. It still bugged him that they had yet to locate the phone Carlos had been called on right before he’d left the luxury bungalow in Lyndhurst. In Jake’s mind there was no reason it wouldn’t have been with the body. Carlos had put the phone in his left trouser pocket. The wallet had been recovered from his right trouser pocket. Whilst it was theoretically possible that with the body floating beneath the water, the phone could have become dislodged and floated out of his pocket, Jake was sure there was something they still hadn’t identified.

  Could he have thrown it out of a window on the drive to the lake? Or had he stopped and chucked it in a bin? Possible, but unlikely. If his sole intention was to kill himself, why make an effort to ditch the phone first? It made no sense, and was a growing source of frustration for Jake.

  Staring out of his window, he wondered what other secrets they might uncover inside the offices of The New Forest Post. A glass-fronted building, it stretched the length of two newsagents, and had three floors of office space, but from where Jake was sat, the top floor looked vacant. Harry Venables appeared at the glass door, and waved.

  Letting out a tired grunt, Jake pushed the car door open and jogged across the road, as Harry opened the door for him.

  ‘What couldn’t wait?’ Jake asked, as he spotted the nervousness in Harry’s posture.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Having left the Better Health office in Bournemouth, Jake had been preparing to drive to New Milton to advise Inspector Carlton that the case could be closed. He knew she was getting pressure from above, and the fact that the park had now been reopened to the public, any supplementary evidence discovered would be tainted. But then Harry had called and told him to get across to Lymington and meet him at this location. As Jake surveyed the vacant desks, with patches in the dust where computer monitors had once stood, he couldn’t understand the urgency. The air was thick with dust and bore a musty smell that was unpleasant, yet
somehow perfectly suited the museum-esque quality of the place.

  ‘Over here,’ Harry called from a desk near the back of the long office. A woman with short brown hair was hunched over a keyboard, her face only a couple of inches from the screen.

  ‘Jake Knight, this is my Aunt Kate, she was a reporter here at the post for forty years before they closed the office to go online. I asked her to see what she could find on Charles Xavier and his dead son.’

  Jake didn’t like the excited tone in Harry’s voice, but offered his hand to the woman, who he now saw wore thick jam-jar glasses, and who obviously coloured her hair. Her fingers were ice cold, and she didn’t so much shake his hand as brush his fingers before returning to the keyboard and screen.

  At the very back of the floor were large brown cardboard boxes stacked, papers hanging out of most of them, suggesting each was stuffed full.

  ‘What happened to this place?’ Jake asked innocently.

  ‘You want a tour?’ Harry offered. ‘They still have the original printing press behind that back wall. It’s an antique apparently and will either end up in a museum or will be sold privately at auction. The Post moved to a smaller, more modern office last year when they stopped printing papers and went digital-only. Kate worked here all her life, and is one of two key holders, while the owners wait for someone to make an offer on the place. Back in the day, this place was a hub of activity. I remember coming here to see my aunt when I was younger, and loved the intrigue and pace of the place. Every reporter was either on the phone, running from one desk to another with papers and questions, or busy typing to deadlines. It fascinated me, and for a long time I thought about becoming a journalist. It’s a crime that the place will be sold, probably knocked down and turned into luxury apartments.’

  Jake was surprised by Harry’s sentimentality. ‘I’d have thought you’d approve of them going digital only. Your generation doesn’t buy newspapers. Besides, it’s better for the environment.’

  ‘Yeah, but if these walls could talk, right?’

  ‘Here we go,’ Kate suddenly said from the desk, sitting back, and tapping the monitor, a smug look forming on her face. ‘Who said they can’t teach an old dog new tricks?’

  Jake stared at the monitor. ‘What exactly are we looking at?’

  On the screen was a scanned copy of a newspaper page, though the text was far too small to read. It wasn’t a front cover, but from somewhere inside.

  ‘They didn’t switch off the old press until 1998,’ Harry explained. ‘At that point they switched to digital printing, and the newspapers were put together on a computer rather than by hand. So for newspapers between 1990 and 1998, they scanned copies for posterity. I’ve had Kate looking through the copies for references to Carlos and his son.’

  ‘What about newspapers prior to 1990?’

  Harry nodded at the large cardboard boxes. ‘I’m hoping we won’t need to look through all of those.’

  Jake leaned closer to the screen, trying to decipher the text. ‘Is there any way to enlarge the font?’

  Kate tapped the mouse, and the image grew, and although the text was blurry, he could just about read it.

  ‘My contact at the registry office confirmed Andres Xavier died in April 2003. Slit his wrists, leaving a suicide note which simply read “Sorry”. So I asked Kate whether she could remember if The Post reported the death, and she wasn’t sure but agreed to search for their names. What neither of us expected to learn was 2003 wasn’t the first time Andres was in the papers. Three years earlier, he was front page news.’

  Jake’s eyes were aching as he strained to read the pixelated blotches. ‘Just tell me,’ he eventually said, straightening.

  ‘On New Year’s Day 2000, two youths were found stumbling through the New Forest, covered in blood, gaunt and bruised, wearing clothes that were threadbare. A passing breakdown service van stopped to help them, and immediately contacted the emergency services who rushed the young men to hospital where they were held under police supervision, neither able to speak initially. But after four days, one of the youths did, revealing he was Andres Xavier, who had gone missing in 1993 while playing on Southampton Common.’

  Jake reached for the desk top to steady himself. ‘My God, I think I remember...’

  ‘The two youths later revealed that they’d been held prisoner by a man they knew only as “Uncle Ron” on a farm not far from here. They were able to lead police back to the farm, where uniformed officers discovered “Uncle Ron” lying in a pool of blood at the foot of some stairs in the basement, his throat cut. The press coverage is limited, but Kate was one of three journalists covering the story.’

  ‘Raped and tortured them, he did,’ Kate said, picking up the story, her voice not quivering, despite the vitriol of her words. ‘Locked them in the basement when they were only children, and would feed them on scraps, and abuse one of them every night. I managed to get hold of one of the police interview tapes with the other boy, and it didn’t make pleasant listening. “Uncle Ron”, or Ronald DeVane to give him his full name, was a violent man. Had spent time in prison for assault and battery of his first wife, who had been some twenty years younger than him. Seems she couldn’t give him what he really wanted, and she filed for divorce while he was inside, telling police of the various attacks he made on her. God knows where she is now. Changed her name and left the country from what I heard.

  ‘Although Ron’s violent nature was known to police, his taste for young boys escaped the radar, and so some years after his release he abducted a young Irish boy who was in on a school trip down this way. Held him in that basement, and promised he’d release him if he helped Ron abduct a replacement. That’s how Andres ended up in Ron’s clutches, but once he had the two of them he couldn’t let either go, or his secret would be revealed. So Ron locked them both down there and would only allow them up on a chain at night when nobody would see them.’

  Jake’s stomach turned at the memory. ‘The youths – one eighteen, the other seventeen – hatched a plan. Knowing he would allow them up to watch local fireworks from the farm on New Year’s Eve, they jumped him and used a shiv one of them had made to slit DeVane’s throat, forcing him back into the basement where they locked him in and left him to die. But with no shoes, and only the clothes on their backs, and of course, with no idea where they were, they stumbled blindly into the darkness looking for help. I was new into uniform when this was going on, but I remember the detectives on the case telling stories of the dungeon he’d held them in.’

  ‘I can try and print the pages for you, but I can’t guarantee the quality of the copy,’ Kate added. ‘These were scanned back before high resolution images were widespread. We only had a small budget, so means were limited.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jake said. ‘Could you email me the images instead? Maybe our Tech guys can sharpen the text.’ He handed her the business card with his email address on it. ‘What happened to the boys after the discovery of Ron’s body?’

  ‘No charges were ever brought against them, as far as I recall,’ Kate said. ‘They were traumatised and the last I’d heard were being treated in specialist psychiatric hospitals. That kind of abuse for so many years isn’t something you ever escape. And I think it affected Andres the worst. He’d become emotionally dependent on Ron – a father figure – and had been the one to run the blade across his throat. You’d be pretty screwed up if you killed your father, no? So he struggled to adapt to a life outside of that basement and with Ron no longer there to care for him. He didn’t know how to cook, lacked an education and had no idea how to live in the modern world he had no memory of. I don’t think he remembered who his parents were when they were reunited. And I think that affected the parents too. For years they’d petitioned the police to keep looking for their son, but after seven years you begin to assume the worst. So then to be reunited with him – a shadow of his former self – I think they would have been better off if he’d died.’

  Suddenly Carlos’s pai
n and feeling of loss seemed so much clearer. To lose a son and have him returned broken and unable to help would be the worst possible punishment for any parent to endure.

  ‘What can you tell me about the other youth: the Irish kid?’ Jake asked.

  Kate frowned. ‘His parents didn’t want their name further tarnished, so his name never appeared in any of the newspaper reports. I did meet him though, but I forget what his name was. Sorry, the brain isn’t what it once was. I’m sure I have it in my notes somewhere, and if you give me some time I should be able to find it.’

  Jake was about to thank her, when he felt his mobile vibrating in his pocket. Seeing Tosh’s name in the display he immediately answered it.

  ‘Jake? I need you back in Southampton ASAP. Have you heard about this morning’s stabbing?’

  ‘I have, sir, yes, but I’m still in the middle of -’

  ‘Inspector Carlton has released you back to our unit. I need you to take a statement from a witness to the murder. She’s nursing a hangover, but we believe she was the last person to see the victim alive, and need to know what she saw. I’ll text you the address.’

  Jake pocketed the phone. ‘Thank you both for everything you’ve found so far. Do me a favour, and keep digging. Any luck tracing that phone or number?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I have someone checking and will let you know as soon as I have it.’

  Jake fixed him with a look. ‘This is good work, Harry. Maybe there is a detective in there waiting to get out. Call me as soon as you have an update, and see what else you can find out about this Xavier mess.’

  FIFTY-TWO

  Megan’s hand throbbed from the act of writing. When had it become so hard to hold a pen and write? She’d become so used to typing that her hand refused to obey, and as she massaged the cramp in her right palm with her thumb, she’d decided she would have to look into some kind of cheap second-hand laptop if she was to properly record these strange nightmares.