by Will Harker
Wheels locked, rubber burned. The Merc fishtailed across the blacktop. A hundred bits of trash flew in all directions and I heard the smash of my mother’s books in the boot. As I spun ninety degrees to face the cornfield, blue-black smoke from the tyres wafted across the windscreen. I’d stopped, but on this side of the barrier or on the tracks? In my panic, I couldn’t tell.
I cuffed sweat from my eyes; glanced through the passenger window.
“Jesus fu–!”
The train blared past, barely a foot from the car, its hammer-tread juddering into my bones. Resisting the lunge of my stomach I unclipped my seatbelt, kicked open the door, and pulled myself free. At first, I thought my legs might give way and I clutched at the roof for support. Over a mile long, the engine hauled its tankers and freight across the feathery expanse of the cornfield.
A breath caught in my chest. In the spaces between cargo, I could see a man standing in the road beyond. He appeared like one of those cartoons in a kid’s flipbook. A figure that only moved when you riffled the pages. Separated by the trundling mass of the train, I could only watch as he stared back at me through those glancing spaces. In the flashing red light of the crossing, I saw that he was wearing a balaclava and black gloves. He appeared to be of medium height, although since he almost blended into the night, it was difficult to be sure. Before getting back into the stolen car, he held up his hand and waved.
Even then I didn’t feel that it was a mocking gesture. More like a sporting salute between opponents. A tip of the hat that said: Welcome to the game.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE TIDE WAS HIGH when I crossed the Menai Strait, black water frothing as it surged beneath the piers of the great suspension bridge that linked the isle of Anglesey to the Welsh mainland. Summer seemed to have vanished and an autumnal drizzle streaked the windscreen. Beyond the bridge, the island gave over some grudging space for a road that threaded out to its northern shore.
This area was less desolate than some of the last miles of the mainland, where monolithic hills hid their crowns among lowering clouds, but there remained a kind of secretiveness to the country. Nameless lanes appeared out of nowhere, dips in the landscape fooled the eye. I remembered reading once that this had been among the final strongholds of the ancient princes of Wales, and that nationalism still had its natural home among the islanders. Looking about me, I couldn’t say I was surprised.
I opened the window a crack and breathed in air salted by the Irish sea. On the passenger seat, Webster growled in his sleep. I reached over and ruffled the scruff around his neck. If only the mutt could tell me who had brought him to Bradbury End.
Returning to the cul-de-sac last night, I’d found the bungalow in darkness. By that time, the thrill of the chase had dissipated and all I could think of was Harry’s face staring up at me. The fear in those eyes after I’d mistakenly attacked him. I never wanted him to look at me that way again.
I had stood on the doorstep, raising and lowering my hand, never quite summoning the courage to knock. I knew I ought to pack up and move on. Even without the danger posed by the man I hunted, I was pretty certain that I could bring Haz nothing but misery. But wasn’t it already too late? The killer now knew where he lived, might even know of our past connection. At least if I stayed, I could keep an eye on him.
That’s the story I told myself. The truth was, after ten lonely years, I had only just found him again. And yes, it wasn’t the fairy tale reunion of my dreams but nor was it the cold rejection I’d dreaded. We had been happy once, and perhaps I was reading too much into things, but he had seemed pleased to see me. Until I’d ruined everything, of course. Now he had glimpsed the violence I trailed in my wake, he probably wanted nothing to do with me.
It was as I turned back to the trailer, my mind set on leaving, that I saw the note taped to my door. I still had old love letters in that small, cramped hand—keepsakes I cherished. Mouth dry, I unpeeled the note: Scott, I came to talk things over but you’d gone off somewhere. BTW, where’d the dog come from?! When I opened the door, he very nearly took my head off! Anyway, I realise that you probably thought I was some kind of intruder, so I’m sorry if I reacted badly. Let’s talk when you get home tomorrow. H x
Home.
I’d taken a shaky breath reading that word. He’d had every reason to reject me but instead, he was willing to offer me the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t occur to me then that there was no caution in those words, nothing to reflect the fear he’d felt when he looked up at me.
Back inside the trailer, I went to the area where Harry had been standing when I attacked him. My medications with their labels turned to the wall were untouched while a bottle of mineral water stood to one side. That was what he’d been doing, leaving the water and a glass. I rubbed my eyes and rested his note against my pillow. Then I took out my phone and called Dad.
After midnight, and his voice was clear as a bell. I sometimes wondered if he slept at all.
“You rocked up in Bradbury then? Everything all right?”
“Had a run-in with some gavvers.” I sighed. “Just the usual sort of dinlos.”
He grunted at that. “Don’t go barnying before we’ve even built up, son.”
“I’ll try my best.” I put the phone on loudspeaker and slipped the cardboard box containing Adya Mahal’s flesh from my pocket. Over by the locker settee, Webster continued to dream. “About the dog–” I began.
“God knows why you wanted to take that poor old juk with you,” Dad muttered.
“You think I took him?”
A pause. “That’s what your note said: took Webster for a bit of company. Thought it sounded overly sentimental for you. What are you saying, that you didn’t take him? Who left the note under my mat then?”
“Calm down, Dad. He’s here, safe and sound.”
“Then I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Scott,” he grunted. “I want a straight answer: this case or whatever it is you’re looking into. You promised me there was no danger to us. Is that still true? Because midnight phone calls do not put me at my ease.”
I stared down at the box in my hands. “There is someone dangerous in Bradbury End,” I said. “But I don’t have any reason to believe that he’ll come after us. He has his rules and I think he’ll stick to them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I almost told him then, but some words of my mother came back to me, “You think the aunts are bad? Showmen are the biggest gossips on any ground, and your dad is just about the worst of them. You want to keep a secret, don’t ever speak a word of it in front of George Jericho.” It was true, middle-aged Travellers like my dad and Sam Urnshaw could while away whole days telling tales. Even if I swore him to secrecy, the truth about my investigation would be all over the fair by mid-morning. Then the killer might really have a reason to target the Travellers.
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” I said. “If there’s any direct threat, I’ll tell you.”
“Always too close for your own good.” He barked out a bitter laugh. “Just like your mother. She might even still be here if she’d spoken up.”
I started to remonstrate with him when he launched a curveball. “That chap, Zac’s been asking after you. Fond of you, I reckon. Just be careful you don’t drag him into whatever mess you’ve got yourself involved with. He doesn’t deserve to get hurt because of your recklessness.”
The phone went dead and I returned my attention to Webster and the box.
The killer must have come onto the ground in the early hours, taken the juk and left the note. That suggested someone with access to my handwriting. Did that also rule out someone from Bradbury End? Not necessarily. The tabloid paparazzo, Maxine Thierrot, who had continued to stalk me even after my release from prison, had gained access to a report I’d written on our first interview with Kerrigan. Her editor had published it un
der the banner: DISGRACED COP SABOTAGES MURDER CASE. The story was probably still online, so anyone might study my handwriting at their leisure.
I got up and placed the box in the crisper compartment of my fridge. I knew there was no point handing it over to the police. The smell of bleach on the greaseproof paper was strong. Just like the crime scenes, not a scrap of forensic evidence would be found.
There had been one more surprise before leaving Bradbury. As dawn lit the road leading out of town, I saw the burned-out shell of a car still smoking in a layby. I didn’t need to stop. I knew it was the stolen Volkswagen and that it had been left in the hope that I might see it. Another message from the man in the balaclava: Hurry back, Scott—the fun is just beginning!
The bay of Benllech sat in the scoop of the village that bore its name. A steep hill on one side plunged down to a stretch of rain-sodden sand and the grey tumble of the sea. On a better day, that water might sparkle, blue as the Adriatic. On the far side, the bay rose again at a gentler gradient to meet the coastal pathways that cut around to Red Wharf Bay where Campbell had his holiday home.
I drove on, past a charming white-washed café, until I reached the eastern side of Benllech and the gate of the Sweet View Caravan Site. The location lived up to its name with a breath-taking panorama of the beach. I parked up and headed for the reception block. A few families in anoraks were braving the elements, kids with buckets and nets, excited chatter about crabbing pools. Entering the reception, I wiped the rain from my eyes.
“Bore da,” I smiled at the young woman behind the desk.
She glanced up from her magazine and slid the lollypop out of her mouth. “Don’t try it on, sweetheart. You haven’t got the accent. English?”
“That obvious?” I winced.
She sighed and flipped a page. “You’re tidier’n most, I’ll give you that. But English is English. Anyway, if you’re wanting a caravan, I’m all out, so a good morning in Welsh and a lush smile won’t get you anywhere…” She glanced at me again. “I knock off at four, though, if you fancy a pint.” Then, stretching her arms behind her back, she yawned and blinked. “But maybe not. Gay, is it?”
I laughed. “You’d make a good detective.”
“Tidy and not Welsh. Had to be gay. So is that what you are, police?”
“Journalist,” I said. Her eyes lit up and she leaned forward.
It was a trick I’d often played during my time in plain clothes. It doesn’t matter how much you try to reassure them, witnesses are more likely to talk openly to journos than CID detectives. There’s the freedom of being off the record for one thing, plus the fact that media interest in their opinion does wonders for the public’s ego. Of course, impersonating a hack was a disciplinary offence, but I’d never been caught and Garris had always appreciated the results.
“Paper or telly?” she wondered.
“Online. Be happy to pay you a little something for your time. Shall we say forty quid?” Her eyes went neon and I kicked myself for going in so high. Still, it was Campbell’s money, so I didn’t feel too bad. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about what happened to your old boss…”
I made sure I filmed our interview, both to set the scene and so that I could review the footage later. It quickly became apparent that Adele knew next to nothing about her late employer’s murder. His body had been discovered by a rambler and the police had found McAllister’s head and the torso of his dog, Bestie, inside his caravan. He had been an OK boss, a bit tight when it came to bonuses, but even that, her tone implied, did not warrant his ritualistic decapitation. And Bestie had been just adorable.
“Bit late in the day for all this, innit?” she said as we finished up. “Old Bob’s been dead six months or more.”
“It’s a feature piece I’m doing,” I said, turning off the recording. “You know the sort of thing. Clickbait for the morbidly inclined? Ten Gruesome Unsolved Mysteries. Spooky Crimes That Will Keep You Guessing.”
She waved her lolly stick at me. “You want spooky you should go talk to that old witch Debney. Mad as a ferret and stinks twice as bad. I bet your readers would just lap up all her ghost story bullshit.”
“Debney?” My mind went back to the file; I didn’t recall the name. “Was she interviewed by the police?”
“I doubt they took much notice of her. But if you can stand the stench, she might be worth a chat.”
“What’s her story?”
Adele twirled the lolly stick against the side of her head. “Says she saw him that night, is all.”
I tried to keep my voice level. “The killer?”
“Not just a killer.” Adele grinned. “The devil himself, so she says.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“THOSE LITTLE SLICES OF DEATH, how I long for them.”
“Loathe them, isn’t it?”
Miss Debney stared at me. When she smiled, her bloodless upper lip, furred with the trace of a moustache, exposed a cemetery of rotten teeth.
“You know Edgar’s work? Oh, but you are most welcome here then!”
She spread her arms and I tried to concentrate on breathing through my mouth. The name of her hillside cottage, Annabel Lee, ought to have given me the clue as to this former English lecturer’s obsession. It had been scrawled on a garden gate glazed with webs and then daubed again, in dripping yellow paint, on the front door. A door that, when opened, I’d almost reeled back from.
It’s difficult to describe the smell. I had been the officer first on scene at countless deaths, natural and otherwise; the reek of a putrefying corpse is a rankness that’s hard to get used to, but the stench of poor Miss Debney’s cottage was something else. A damp, stale, fetid odour, suggestive of the living death of this shunned woman.
“Sleep,” she nodded. “A curse to both Edgar and myself. Do you know, Mr Jericho, I do not believe that I have actually slept at all in the past fifteen years? Now, you’ll tell me that such a thing is physiologically impossible, but I assure you that the human mind can overcome the base needs of the body. In point of fact, I have not eaten since the turn of the millennium.”
Looking at her, I could almost believe it. Dwarfed by the armchair in which she sat, the Witch of Annabel Lee—as she told me the local children called her—appeared like some kind of skeletal puppet. Her clothes, marked with stains I didn’t want to guess at, hung loosely from her bones. The sitting room was dark, windows pasted over with old newspapers, but still, Miss Debney’s face shone out, waxy in the gloom.
I sat forward on the couch, careful not to touch its crusted cushions. There was no TV that I could see, no radio, no laptop. Just pile upon pile of books. It made me think of my own trailer only a couple of days ago, and I wondered again at the change the deaths of three strangers had brought to my life. Trying to ignore the itching sensation that prickled my skin, I reached over and picked up a collection of short stories: Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
“Were you awake the night your neighbour died, Miss Debney?” I held up the book. “Reading Poe, maybe?”
“Edgar,” she corrected. “He calls me Una and I call him Edgar. We have an understanding. That was why the college sacked me in the end. You see, I could tell my students what Edgar really meant in his tales and poetry because he spoke to me.”
“In spirit?”
She drew herself up. “In person. Much as I enjoy the pleasing terror of his masterpieces, I do not believe in ghosts, Mr Jericho. I am not a child and I am not mad. But in fact, Edgar did not come to me on the night of poor Mr McAllister’s passing. I was in my garden–” She wafted a hand towards the window, beyond which weeds had grown waist-high and hidden things chirruped among the stalks. “Counting stars. And the spaces between stars.”
“That must have taken a while,” I said.
“I was distracted,” her brow furrowed, “by a light. Not a star, but something new and earthly. A will-o’-the-wisp, down near the edge of the cliffs where old McAllister
had his caravan. It was winter, you see, January, and that wisp had no business being where he was. Unlike me, the murdered man was no stranger to sleep, you understand?”
“It was winter,” I nodded. “So the caravan park was closed up. And you’re saying McAllister usually went to bed early?”
“Made himself go,” she cackled. “A skinflint. Used to come up here to pick the blackberries in my garden. Even the children won’t do that anymore. Made sure he was all tucked up for the night by seven—lights out, heating off. Plenty of money and yet insisted on freezing himself near to death.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Nobody knows anyone well, Mr Jericho. What I knew he chose to show me—McAllister: no family, no loved ones, except maybe that dog of his. Went everywhere together, thick as thieves. People were horrified by what was done to them, but I believe it might even have been an act of mercy. I assure you, McAllister would not have wanted to live a moment longer than that beast.”
“So you saw a light, what next?”
“‘Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting–’”
“‘Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before?’” I said.
She gave me a cool look. “Finally, I decided I must be like Edgar’s C. Auguste Dupin and investigate the mystery of the incongruous light.”
“You’re not going to tell me McAllister was murdered by an outraged orangutan, are you?”
“It was cold, the night wind screaming off the sea,” she went on. “I left my cottage and wandered down the hillside into Sweet View. All around me, the white caravans seemed to grow up out of the earth, like rows of silent tombs. Every one locked up, every one dark, except his. When I reached his door, I believe I heard something. McAllister—or perhaps what was left of him—weeping. You’ll say I couldn’t possibly have heard such a thing, not with the wind braying so, but I assure you I heard.”
Although what she said was impossible, I nodded. McAllister had been killed by three puncture wounds to the heart. He would have died almost instantaneously; no time for weeping.