Something Evil Comes

by A. J. Cross

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘He also wants to see you and the lieutenant.’

  Watts stood. ‘You couldn’t find us, right Barb?’ They headed for the door.

  In the afternoon’s fading light, Hanson followed Corrigan’s Volvo onto the parking area, pulling up facing the open land and its headstones, the church to her left, Church House on the right. There was no car parked outside the house, no lights visible inside. She opened her door, hearing distant traffic in the stillness.

  They walked the path, headstones on either side and up to the house sitting on its high ground, up the steps and onto its wide veranda where Corrigan rang the bell. Getting no response they watched as he went around the side of the house. He was back within a minute. ‘Nobody home. No lights. Nothing.’

  ‘Where might he have gone?’ said Hanson. ‘His housekeeper isn’t here either. There’s no car.’

  Watts walked back down the steps to scrutinise the house frontage. ‘He could be out doing some of that outreach work he told us about.’

  ‘I didn’t get the impression he’s that hands-on.’

  ‘The housekeeper doesn’t live in?’

  ‘No. She lives locally.’

  ‘Where?’

  Hanson frowned, sifting memory for the small detail which at the time hadn’t seemed relevant. What was it? Something incongruous. Something which didn’t fit Eunice Gorridge in any …

  ‘Primrose Way. Delaney said it was local to here.’

  ‘We’ll find her. Ask where he is and what she’s got to say about him.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ murmured Hanson.

  ‘If we get no joy from her, we’ll come back here to see if he’s turned up.’

  ‘Let me know what you find out, if anything.’ She went with them to the Volvo, searching the pockets of her overcoat, watching Corrigan tap Primrose Way into the satnav.

  ‘Where you off to now?’ asked Watts.

  ‘The university to collect some work then home, with a quick detour to headquarters. I’ve left my phone there.’

  Watts waved a large hand as the Volvo’s engine roared into life. ‘If you see the chief and he asks you where we are, you know nothing.’

  As soon as Hanson walked through the door of UCU she saw her phone lying on the table. She checked it for messages from her colleagues. Nothing. Knowing Gorridge’s antipathy for the police and virtually everybody else, she’ll be as unhelpful as possible for as long as possible.

  Dropping the phone into her bag she headed out, lingering at the board’s blank surface, resisting the temptation to start it up. She needed a break. She was going home. Walking through reception on her way to the main doors she was stopped by someone calling her name. Gus Stirling from Upstairs. She turned. ‘Hi, Gus.’

  He beckoned her. ‘Just the person I’m looking for. Have you got five minutes?’

  She followed him upstairs listening as he told her about the ongoing problems he and his team were having with their review cases. ‘That’s why I was looking for you. Cold cases are your territory, Kate, and I don’t mind admitting we’re floundering. We need some advice.’

  She followed him inside the squad room where several officers were engrossed at screens or reading hard data, the atmosphere low-key. Gus pointed to information written on two large glass screens, the pressure he was under quickening his delivery. ‘The two abduction cases: Zoe Wilson, aged thirteen when she was taken six years ago, Rosie Mahoney, seven years old when she disappeared eleven years ago.’ He pointed to two photographs pressed to the screen, one of a dark-haired, teenage Zoe, next to it that of a small girl of about five or six with pale blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Eleven years. A long time. Too long for a good outcome. ‘No connection between the abductions?’ she asked.

  ‘None identified at the time or by us so far. Zoe disappeared from a fairground. No known witnesses. Rosie was small for her age when she disappeared from outside her house. A single report of her being put into “a large car”, never verified. That’s about all we’ve got.’

  Hanson absorbed the limited detail. ‘No CCTV?’

  ‘No.’

  She turned to Gus who looked worn. She understood. ‘I’m sure you’re doing all the right things, Gus: re-evaluating all the known facts, following up the slimmest of leads, which is what UCU does but it doesn’t always pay off.’

  He looked dispirited. ‘I’m sorry, Gus. I don’t see that I can add anything.’

  She looked at the second screen. ‘This is your other review?’

  ‘Yes. The rape series for which we’ve also got nothing. No DNA, no witnesses.’

  ‘What about the victims? What’s their response to the review?’

  ‘Two have refused to help us. They don’t want to go through it all again, which I understand. The other two are very willing and we’ve got female officers wanting to work with them, but we need to get the best and smallest details from them and that won’t be easy.’

  Hanson nodded. ‘I’ll give you some current research information on ways of talking to sexual crime complainants which can help cue them into the detail of their attackers’ behaviour. Have you done any geographical profiling of the areas of the attacks?’

  ‘We could do with some guidance on that.’

  ‘I’ll let you have it sometime tomorrow.’

  She went out of the squad room, down the stairs and out, Gus’s thanks following her. UCU was still floundering, she was out of ideas and no one was coming along any time soon with offers of help. Starting her car she headed towards the university. Like Gus, they badly needed some momentum. She drove, a rhythm starting up inside her head. An earworm: Zoe – Rosie. Zoe – Rosie. Zoe – Rosie. Zoe— On impulse, she changed direction and headed for St Bartholomew’s. Delaney may have returned and her colleagues might have achieved the impossible, prised information from Gorridge and be back there now.

  She came onto the church grounds, stopped the car and looked around the deserted parking area. The repetitive rhythm was back: Rosie – Zoe – Rosie – Zoe – Rosie … God, I’m tired. She glanced across to Church House. It was as closed-looking as when she and her colleagues were last here an hour or so ago. She looked at its upper floors, away, then back, eyes fixed on one window. Switching off the engine, eyes still fixed, she got out into silence and falling darkness. It was there again. In the upper window. Robbed of all colour in the moonlight. She gazed at the house, bulky on its high ground. Matthew’s face as it looked in death was inside her head again. Its avidness. Its expectation. She still didn’t know what Matthew wanted of her. She got a sudden, irrational certainty that there was something here, inside this house, waiting to tell her.

  Approaching it, eyes still on the window, her heart squeezed. The watcher was still there. Reaching the veranda steps she looked up again. The glass was now covered by something. Hanson put all critical thinking on hold, knowing that if she gave the situation a second’s thought she would be heading for her car. The repetitive beat was back. Zoe – Rosie – Zoe – Rosie … Raking her fingers through her hair, tension spiralling, she went up the steps to the front door. She placed her hands against its cold, black-painted surface. It moved. She snatched them away. Run. Get away! Now! Zoe – Rosie … She dug inside her pocket, gripped her phone. Since this case had started, Matthew Flynn had been trying to tell her something. If the answer was here in this house, she and her colleagues had to have it. There might never be another chance. Pushing the door she came into the shadowy, dark-painted hall with its palm-hand walls, stairs facing her. She flinched at the front door’s soft click behind her. In the darkness a narrow seam of light showed at the edges of one of the doors beyond the hall. The door of Delaney’s study. He was here! He had to tell her all that he knew.

  The only sounds her own swallow reflex and a rhythmic thump she realised was her heart, she went to the door, put her head close to it. ‘Father Delaney? It’s Kate Hanson.’

  Silence. Reaching down for the handle she pushed open th
e door. A fire was burning low in the hearth, the room warm, heavy, red, velvet curtains drawn across its window. He was sitting on the high-backed chair, facing his desk.

  ‘Father Delaney?’

  She went slowly to him, turned, looked down at him, just one coherent thought in her head: the headquarters’ forensic artist knew what he was doing when he produced the anatomical sketch of Matthew Flynn’s throat injury. She was looking at one exactly like it, real, visceral, sickening, the high-backed chair the sole support for Delaney’s head. Cold, shocked, her eyes moved slowly over the bloodstained carpet, looking for what had killed him, not finding it. The desk was mired in blood, splashed and splattered over the papers on it: handwritten records, payments-in, payments-out, lists, dates, certificates for shares. Bonds. Initials: A.B— Alfred? Seeing it all, she knew. St Bartholomew’s was not a church. Its foremost task was profit through business acumen and the wealth of its elderly parishioners. Hanson gazed at Delaney’s face, the eyes still open, the plumpness slack now, dull and grey. He’d led it all. Corrigan was right. Delaney had played games with her: about Burns and about himself in his mocking challenges of psychology, his manipulation of the congregation at the re-consecration. His past had followed him here. She and her colleagues knew the sexual enigma that he was. Now he was dead.

  A sound on the upper floor jerked her head upwards, the two-name tempo back, quicker now: Zoe – Rosie – Zoe – Rosie, matching the blood-beat inside her head. Taking out her phone she sent a brief text to both her colleagues.

  Leaving Delaney’s corpse, she walked out of the room and across the hall, senses on high alert. She was stopped by a small, sweet sound which stirred the hairs at the nape of her neck. ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements … You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s …’ She stood, one foot on the first stair, the two-name pulse in her head now a thunderous drumbeat, her subconscious giving up what it knew: Zoe! – Rosie! – Zoe Wilson! – Rosie Ma— Facts on a glass screen rushed to her head: a small girl, missing for eleven long years. Delaney the towering figure, the sexual enigma would have needed someone, a business partner, personal fixer to obtain what Hanson knew was waiting for her here

  She went silently up the stairs to the landing, guided by the ethereal voice, past several closed doors to one she knew opened onto a room at the front of this house. ‘I owe you five farthings say the bells of St—’ The voice stopped as if a switch had been pulled. Hanson watched her own hand reach for the doorknob, turn, then release it. The door swung wide. In front of her was a poor, cold cell, ragged lace over the window, bare floor, the one item of furniture apart from the bed an incongruous white-painted dressing table, exuberant in design, Hanson herself, pale, large-eyed, reflected in its small, asymmetrical-framed mirror. A window, according to Crystal one afternoon a hundred years ago. A pale, thin female, blonde, barely more than a girl, was facing Hanson, eyes wide. Hanson saw them dart to the narrow bed and its thin blanket, a single pathetic barrier between them. She wanted to weep. How could anyone treat another person like this? This person had a name. She had seen it written up in Gus’s notes. She’d seen the years’ old photograph. Mahoney. Had Matthew used it as a pet name? Or was it his approximation of something, half-remembered by this girl? Face calm, her movements minimal, Hanson took two steps into abject privation and stood.

  ‘Hello Honey,’ she whispered.

  Thin hands rushed the pale face, the soft voice plaintive, breaking. ‘… Matthew?’

  Hanson put her phone to her ear. Dropping her voice, she gazed at the waif-like figure and the cheerless room. ‘Gus? It’s Kate Hanson.’

  ‘Hi, Kate!’ His voice was strong, from a world of warmth and light and caring. ‘You’ve found something else to help us?’

  Hanson nodded. ‘Yes. I’m with Rosie Mahoney.’ She listened to stunned silence, seeing a flicker of recognition in the small, white face.

  ‘What? … Where?’

  ‘Church House.’ She gave the address. ‘Watts and Corrigan know it. They should be on their way.’ Ending the call she took two tentative steps towards the young woman, keeping her voice low. ‘I need you to come with me, Honey. It’s time to go.’ Time to go home. Honey’s eyes darted away from her, one thin arm reaching out to snatch the blanket, pulling it against herself as if her life depended on it. It probably had at times if this awful, frigid box had been her world for much of the last eleven long years.

  The enormous eyes fastened on Hanson, voice scarcely audible. ‘I can’t. She won’t give me dinner. She’ll take my blanket.’ She folded her thin arms around it. ‘I can’t leave my father.’

  Gorridge. Delaney. Hanson understood. Eleven long, captive years, with rare outings once her bond was so strong that she came back to where there was no comfort, no pleasure, no tenderness. Until a young man had somehow discovered she existed. A young man who had maybe grown to love her. Had Matthew planned to rescue her using money he had saved, maybe stolen, some of which he’d given to street-wise Callum Foley in exchange for his help? Or had he died simply because he knew she existed?

  Hanson held out her hands, still using the name Matthew had given her. ‘Honey, my name is Kate. Trust me. Come with me. Now.’

  Her eyes on Hanson’s face, Honey stayed where she was and Hanson knew she was seeing traumatic bonding. Rosie Mahoney had survived the last eleven by aligning herself with her captors, living with deprivation and abuse as a means of survival. It had kept her captive. She shrank back as Hanson came around the bed, placed her hands around the thin, frigid upper arms and pulled her slowly, gently towards the door, making soft, encouraging sounds as they crossed the room and onto the landing, Honey shaking with cold and shock, face contorted by fear. Hanson took off her overcoat, put it around the thin shoulders.

  ‘It’s OK, Honey,’ she whispered, gently lifting the white arms and slipping them inside the sleeves, quickly tying the belt around the small frame then taking her hand. ‘It’s time to go now.’ Honey pulled back, eyes huge. Hanson held both her hands. ‘I’m going with you, Honey. We’re going together. Down these stairs, see? I’ve got some good friends. They’re coming to help us.’

  They’d covered four of the stairs when Hanson stopped, listened. From somewhere distant on the ground floor she heard steady, determined footfalls on a solid floor, coming closer. Honey shook convulsively, whimpered. The footfalls halted. She turned Honey’s face to hers, placing a finger against her own lips then peered over the bannister. The footsteps started up again. Honey began to cry. Hanson couldn’t see anyone. She looked at the few steps she and Honey had covered so far. No point going back. They would be trapped. The front door. They had to get to it.

  She turned to Honey, put her hands on the slender arms within the thick sleeves. ‘Honey?’ she whispered. ‘I want you to sit on this stair and stay here. I’m going downstairs but I’m coming back for you.’ She took the small, pale face in her hands then raised her finger to her lips again.

  Going quickly, quietly down the stairs, almost to the last one, she stopped and listened. She’d come to this house with three suspects in her head, one of whom she’d found dead. It had been a meeting of minds, in which greed for money and for power grew to be an obsession until one of them became a killer. He was now downstairs, his moral compass obliterated, beyond caring if he made another victim. Or two. He would destroy both Honey and her as surely as he had the others. The footsteps were close now. Looking up, she saw Honey clutching the staircase spindles, eyes frantic. She turned and looked down. He was here. At the bottom of the stairs. Looking up at them.

  Hanson faced him. He was holding the processional brass with its sunray design in one hand, tapping it against his other, both bloody.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  He jabbed the brass towards her. Honey whimpered as Hanson quickly backed away from him. He studied her. ‘If you were really smart you wouldn’t be here. Why aren’t yo
u surprised?’

  ‘Because I’ve thought a lot about you.’

  His lips curled. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I know that you’re controlling, ambitious and greedy. You’re also full of rage. It was the rage that led me to realise it was you.’

  He looked past her. Honey whimpered again. ‘I see you’ve found Delaney’s dirty little secret.’ Engage him. Keep him talking. ‘And yours.’

  He gave her a cold look. ‘You’re way off track there. I’ve got zero interest in children.’

  ‘No. Money was your motive for bringing her here. Delaney paid you. You and he devised a moneymaking scheme to separate wealthy, elderly parishioners from what they had. You killed Alfred, probably because he was threatening to expose you. I’m only surprised that given the ages of some of the congregation, their wealth, you didn’t kill more.’

  ‘There are no more,’ he said. ‘Delaney was a greedy bastard. He wanted everything the old parishioners had and me to get rid of them. I put him straight on that: “Choose the oldest because they’re least likely to notice the money going, and onto the next”.’ He smiled. ‘I was right. They never noticed, they were pleased to be ‘chosen’ for the committee until they eventually died of natural causes. It was just another business venture. We steadily drained their accounts. Amazing what some of these old people had stashed away.’

  She looked at him, cocksure, willing to talk. She knew why. She and Honey weren’t leaving this house. ‘You are amoral.’

  ‘And you’re not listening.’

  Hanson recalled her colleagues’ description of Brad Flynn’s words to his wife minutes after they’d been given the news that one of their sons was dead: ‘You’re not listening. I need food.’ Some acorns fell a long way from the tree. Others stayed close. Delaney had said ‘sons’. How did he know there was more than one, if he didn’t know anything about Brad Flynn’s family, as he’d claimed?

  ‘Why Callum Foley?’ she asked.

  ‘He and Matthew first met at the drugs group. They became friends. Matthew was a pushover. Really impressed by the deacon who ran that group. He started taking an interest in the church. I heard him and Foley arranging to go to a service together. My business interests were taking off here. I was coming and going as I pleased. I didn’t want Matthew hanging around.’ His face darkened. ‘And somehow he found out about her.’ Honey shrank from him as Hanson stood between them. ‘Foley was no good. I thought I could pay him off with a few pounds, until I realised that he was helping Matthew get inside this place to see her. I never expected that. This whole place was my business interest. Not some handout from the great Brad Flynn!’