Philian Gregory

by Simon J. Stephens

  The flat they procured for him was in a development that had slipped onto the backburner for Dexter. Tucked away on the North-East coast, he’d had all sorts of plans to develop the land surrounding it into a leisure complex, but those plans were still to be followed through. It was in an average state of repair, with each of the existing properties having been given a cursory paintjob before being rented out on a short leasehold basis. The potential was huge, once he’d spent money on lifting the specification of the bungalows. Although their location didn’t make the returns available as attractive as the quick-kills he could deliver in London.

  “We thought it best,”, Dexter told Baxter as they entered the empty property, “if you got yourself settled first, before moving your mother in. I appreciate that you are keen for her to join you, but trust that you will honour our wishes.”

  “Yes, that’s no problem.”, Baxter hadn’t seen the place before and was pleasantly surprised by what was being offered to him, “She doesn’t even know about my move yet. I want it to be a surprise for her.”

  “Good, then let me take you on the tour.”

  The two men walked through the various rooms in the small property with Dexter explaining any details that his new tenant needed to know about. There weren’t too many of those details, given the simple layout and clean functionality of the property.

  “Aside from the two bedrooms, lounge and this kitchen,”, Dexter opened a door next to the fridge-freezer, “you also have a fully functioning office down here in the cellar.”

  Flicking a switch, Dexter headed down the revealed staircase and into a large open space that covered the full footprint of the bungalow. The air down there had no hint of the dampness that Baxter had expected to encounter and he smiled as he saw this extra space that was a great surprise to him.

  “This is amazing.”, he said to Dexter.

  “Not bad, is it?”, Dexter replied, “They were put into all the properties by the developer who recently purchased the place. The local council gave him a hard time about various other improvement plans that he wanted to pursue so he simply bypassed them and dug down. It keeps the rest of the complex nice an open, with plenty of room for gardens and allotments. And it gives the residents here a place to escape to. We’ve set this up as an office for you but you’ll see it’s plumbed as a utility space and has all the AV connections you need if you want it to be a den.”

  “So, are you happy with this?”

  Baxter nodded his agreement.

  “Good, then let’s go back upstairs and run through the ground-rules.”

  They settled over a cup of coffee in the bright and airy sitting room that looked out across a large, well-kept lawn, Dexter retrieving a bulky contract from his briefcase and putting it in front of Baxter.

  “Before this becomes official,”, he explained, “and before you sign this, I need to make sure that you are fully aware of your obligations. Yes, it’s a comprehensive and complicated contract but you only really need to check the final section. The rest of it is a standard tenancy agreement, at the rents we discussed. Please, settle back and let me give you the final lecture, then you sign, or not, as you wish.”

  “The Justice Foundation,”, he continued, “as you may have seen from our website, is a small, charitable foundation that works to deliver justice in its own small way. We’ve been involved in many and varied projects over the years, only occasionally venturing into the sort of more challenging interventions that a case like yours brings about. You see, as I made it clear to you when we first met, this is not about supporting you per se. It is about ensuring that justice is done. If you stayed in your old home, our models had you down as being seriously wounded or murdered within a short period. Some might say that was justified. Your actions certainly don’t warrant any sympathy. However, once we saw the likelihood of your being harmed, we had to intervene. Does that make our position clear?”

  “It does.”, Baxter’s reply was gentle and surprisingly humble.

  “Good. Now, let me continue with the most important part. Your identity here is not known to your neighbours. Pick a name and we’ll go with it. In the short-term, we’ll forward your mail discretely and cover any aspects of your life that link you to the past. In the longer term, if all goes smoothly, we will affect the full identity change as a permanent thing. But, and this is the critical part of what I am saying, so please listen very carefully.”

  Dexter paused to drink his coffee and let Baxter settle to hear the next part.

  “Our support for you depends on a degree of trust that you will never have experienced before. Your past crimes, as you well know, deserved a custodial sentence, and if an appeal puts you behind bars then so be it. In giving you a suspended sentence, the presiding judge relied heavily on your assurances that these were events that you had moved on from, were deeply remorseful of, and which were, in your own words, ‘…a blip…’ in an otherwise productive life. We have to accept that. We have to trust in the criminal justice system and be seen to support it against any hints of vigilantism. Hence our intervention and hence my telling you now that if you betray us in even the smallest way, you will lose everything that we are offering you. You have a state-of-the-art computer and superfast broadband here. You have satellite TV and a mobile phone on our account. If you even stray momentarily onto a site or a programme that hints at your still being interested in your past perversions, we will act without haste. Understand?”

  “I do,”, Baxter replied, “and trust me, I won’t let you down. That was all in the past. I can’t thank you enough for this second-chance. I really appreciate it.”

  “Good, then please, a signature at all the marked points and we’re all set.”

  “Your furniture and possessions,”, he continued as Baxter signed the document, “are all on their way, and should be here in the late afternoon. When they arrive, your first job is to go through any and all of them and destroy anything that might breach the conditions that we talked about. And I mean, anything. We’ve supplied you with a heavy-duty shredder in the office and expect you to make full use of it. At some point over the next few days, one of our team will be in to check this place out. Make sure that they find nothing, and I mean nothing, to cause us to change our minds.”

  With the contract signed, Dexter excused himself and left the bungalow. Baxter returned to the kitchen and made another cup of coffee. He had repented of what he’d done. He did understand how merciful the judge had been, although he also knew why that mercy had been extended to him, and he was grateful to his new-found friends for providing a safe place for him to live. He hadn’t been strictly truthful with Johnson about his relinquishing all of his past, but there was no reason that he couldn’t do that from now on. Besides, he’d been given a reprieve. Were his desires uncontrollable in the face of that reprieve? It would be easier with his mother there and, truth be told, he was getting older now and the urges were fewer than they had been in his younger days.

  Driving back to London in his rented SUV, Dexter’s mind drifted through all the events of the past year or so and he found it hard to concentrate on the winding route that even the satellite navigation was struggling with. Turning the radio on, he caught the news headlines and almost lost control of the vehicle as the newsreader detailed the fifteenth victim to be found with a ‘C’ branded on their body. The mystery behind these deaths had only grown deeper over the months since they’d been present at what they believed to be the demise of his first victim and nobody had been able to come up with a motive that made sense. The victims were so completely different in their backgrounds and personal situation that no links could be established between them.

  That was the official line anyway. It was a line that only confirmed to Dexter that this was The Circle tidying up any loose ends and protecting its senior members. The victims were ordinary people. They weren’t very high profile, they didn’t hold high office and t
hey were only really known to family and friends. That too confirmed Dexter’s speculation. But there was an anomaly that he couldn’t get to grips with.

  Baxter was an easy target. He clearly had some sort of influence over Judge Falstaff and had exercised that influence to secure his lenient sentence. In which case, why hadn’t they gone after him? Of course, the public awareness of Baxter’s crimes might give the authorities a clue as to motive, but they didn’t need to leave their ‘C’ calling card. It just didn’t stack up. Unless, he was further down their list.

  That had been the deciding factor in Dexter’s decision to follow up on this case. Baxter might well lead them to Falstaff, which was their primary reason for investing so much in him, but at the same time, he might also lead them to The Circle. They’d set up enough monitoring and surveillance systems around him already to know that there’d not been a sniff from The Circle. It might happen though.

  As for trusting Baxter, he wasn’t holding his breath. He would serve a purpose for Dexter, he hoped, but they’d pick him up doing something sooner or later and have to let him taste a different form of justice. Dave was prepped for that, reluctantly, although Dexter no longer felt the burden of moral responsibility holding him back from acting himself if he had to. It was strange really, how this whole sordid affair was changing him. He was doing things now that he would never have contemplated doing a year ago, and he was getting satisfaction from what he was doing. Once you scratched away at what went on behind closed doors, you got a taste for vengeance that you’d never thought was inside you.

  The guilty were convicted and imprisoned in the eyes of the right-minded. The system worked and the law protected the majority. Until you discovered that it didn’t. That there was one rule of law for one and another for another. That the hidden victims never found justice. That the law was a very fluid and fickle beast, capable of both manipulating and being manipulated. And once you began to see the underside of life, it became harder and harder to ignore it. His own resolution to step aside and return to the mainstream had lasted as long as the nicotine-addict’s New Year’s commitment to change. He’d felt that nagging urge to take on just one more project and believed himself when he’d said it would be his last. But after Falstaff, there would be others. He hated to admit it. It was just something that was meant to be.

  “Boss?”, the voice of Sam Summers filled the car and snapped Dexter out of his thoughts.

  “Yes. Hi Sam. You well?”

  “I’m good thanks. Just giving you an update on your recent deposit. The bungalow is fully functioning and giving us clear feedback. We ran through most of the stuff from the flat but couldn’t find anything of interest. It’s all loaded and on the way now. One hell of a lot of books though. And I mean, a hell of a lot. We couldn’t search them all.”

  “Good work, Sam.”, Dexter replied, “Let’s see what Pandora’s Box delivers up for us. You see the latest news.”

  “Already ahead of you. Victor Newton. Chartered surveyor, wife, kids and grandkids. Pillar of the community, of late. I’ve got the full details here. Maybe best not to share them over the air, but the ‘C’ was definitely earned. We found a reference to him in the data we already have. Same profile. A temporary dabbler, if you’ll excuse the expression, and only involved for a short while. Seems some people have a long memory.”

  “We’ll catch up on it tomorrow. Thanks for the update.”

  They ended the call and Dexter slipped onto the motorway that would deliver him back to his home. He hadn’t needed the confirmation, but if Sam had managed to get that much detail so soon, it showed he was on the ball with this project. In fact, both the twins had proved more than invaluable. Saunders seemed to be a safe pair of hands when it came to doing the day-to-day work that he was increasingly absent from, although he knew that the twins were capable of working around the clock if necessary. They would get their reward one day. He would ensure that. For now, he’d let them continue with their research and, if they came up with a lead for him, well, he might just have to follow it up. It would all end soon enough, of that, he was certain. Well, almost so.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  For those who’d grown up in an age of instant messaging, e-mails and the transfer of anything and everything via the internet, the concept of handwritten missives and badly copied documents was difficult to understand. Dexter was of the generation that had seen the transition and had watched as the benefits of electronic communication piggy-backed with the darker side of the web. And it was that awareness that led him to the breakthrough he needed in monitoring Baxter. Yes, they had every state-of-the-art surveillance gadget focused on him and yes, they had expected that he would breach the terms of his contract with an indiscrete moment on the computer, but they had also factored in the old ways as well.

  It was three days after arriving at the bungalow when Baxter, with every good intention, chose to honour the wishes of The Justice Foundation and purge his life of its darker past. The twins watched from a distance, using the impossibly miniature cameras that would never be discovered, as Baxter unpacked the thousands of books that had been delivered and admired the meticulous way that he began to arrange the exactly as they’d been in his London flat. There was some sense in that arrangement. With so many books, it was natural that he would want them arranged by subject and then in alphabetical order by author surname. He completed the task in a single day, utilising the vast array of bookshelves that lined the walls of the cellar space. Having completed the task, his hidden observers watched as Baxter settled down with a large whisky and fell asleep listening to a Mozart opera.

  After breakfast on the following morning, he pottered around tidying away the last of the items that had been delivered, before returning to the subterranean office, where he stood and stared at the library he’d constructed the previous day.

  “I wandered lonely as a cloud,”, he spoke the poem out loud from memory and pointed with his finger as he did so, stopping at the end of every line to remove the book that his finger had come to rest on.

  The twins called through to Dexter and told him that he might want to see what was going on. He logged into the surveillance network and shared the same vision that they were so captivated by.

  “This could be interesting.”, he told them, “Make sure that you have it from all angles.”

  “Will do,”, Zoe replied, “and it’s all being recorded as well. Not sure where it’s going as we checked the books and they all seemed fine.”

  Having completed that first poem, Baxter returned to the start of the bookshelves and repeated the process with a well-known piece of Thomas Hardy. The end of that poem saw Baxter standing back and surveying the stacks of books at his feet. Books that he began to work through, one by one.

  First, he applied a fine blade to the inside of the front cover of the book, which he then worked gently side by side, separating the inner lining from the hard, outer board. Then, as the paper lifted, he inserted the blade gently into the space he’d created and withdrew a folded piece of paper. That paper was then set aside, face down on the floor, and he started work on the next one.

  “You want us to get ready to visit?”, Sam Summers asked.

  “No, not just yet.”, Dexter replied, “I want to see how this works out. It’s odd, but it may be innocent, and we need to test Baxter’s loyalty.”

  It seemed that that loyalty was holding. The store of papers completed, Baxter put all the books back on the shelf and picked up the pile of papers that he’d retrieved, not even looking at them as he carried them to the shredder. He took a moment to read the small instruction book that had been left with the machine, then he reached out and switched the plug on.

  “You sure you don’t want us to stop this?”, Sam asked again.

  “It’s fine.”, Dexter replied.

  The three of them watched as the pages were fed, one by one, into the shredder, until al
l that remained was a million illegible scraps that Baxter removed from the machine’s bin and placed into a small, clear plastic bag. He ruffled the pieces as he put them in, ensuring that they would tell nothing to anybody who chanced to look through them. With the task completed, he made his way upstairs and began to prepare a salad for his lunch.

  Meanwhile, back in his office, Dexter was punching numbers into his computer keyboard and logging on to the secure network that he used for all his private data. The file had already arrived. It was a fairly big one, but nothing that his server couldn’t handle. As it opened and began to reveal its contents, Dexter couldn’t help but smile.

  The face of a much younger Judge William Falstaff took some effort to recognise, but it’s authenticity was confirmed for Dexter by cross-referring to a number of photographs of him taken at roughly the same time and found by the twins from old copies of his Almer Mata’s monthly magazine. As an exceptional student with exceptional talents over and above his study of the law, Falstaff was a regular in the columns. And Dexter was definitely looking at the same man as he flicked through the documents before him.

  The shredder had cost him more than all the high-tech computing equipment that filled Baxter’s bungalow. The investment had clearly been worth it. It was an illegal product; a shredder that scanned and transmitted everything that was fed into it before doing what the user believed it was there to do. Somehow, he’d known that Baxter would be a pen and paper man. If there had been any use of computers, he wouldn’t risk prison by using them; anybody with even half a brain understood that once you looked into the internet, there were a thousand pairs of eyes looking back at you.

  The photographs were as crude and obscene as any that he had been forced to look at since being dragged into the dark underworld inhabited by The Circle, the known offenders and the everyday folk that nobody ever suspected. They showed Falstaff, always on his own, with a number of different children performing a number of sexual acts on him. Some reversed the action and had the judge using the youngsters for his own pleasure, their faces forced into a smile that told Dexter that the threats they faced for not complying were greater than the pain they were enduring. It was evidence. It couldn’t be ignored. But it was the sort of evidence that you could only look at out of necessity and put promptly aside once it was confirmed as damning.