by Steve Mosby
While it didn’t excuse what he had done, and what he had possibly become, it made it difficult for Groves to hate him the way that Sean presumably thought he should. Everybody’s life was a story that began without them, and for some people, the constraints of that beginning made it difficult to change the ending. Despite Angela Morris’ obvious shortcomings, she didn’t seem like a bad person, and she had seen something in Edward Leland. It seemed important to Groves to remember that what he was reading onscreen right now was not the man himself, but a list of the bad things he had done. There would have been a lot more to him than that.
He scrolled back down, intending to click through for greater detail on Leland’s convictions, cross-referencing any additional names he found with the list Morris had provided. They’d all need following up. He started with the last conviction, and was busy writing down the names of the three other people arrested alongside Leland when he saw it.
SIMO
He paused, then slowly looked down at his hand.
The tip of the pencil was pressed tight against the paper. Not so hard that it had broken, but enough to leave a concentrated dot of black at the bottom of the O.
He forced himself to finish.
SIMON CHADWICK.
He looked at the screen. The name was right there, as plain as day. Leland’s arrest that day for dealing had taken place in Chadwick’s flat on the Thornton estate.
Simon Chadwick, the man with the mental age of a child. Who was so easily taken advantage of by the unscrupulous people he came into contact with. Edward Leland had been one of his associates.
Groves checked the date.
It had been just over a year after Leland’s arrest at Chadwick’s flat that Groves had knocked at that same address and Laila Buckingham had been found, tied up and close to death, in the back bedroom. Another two years until his own son had been taken in turn, presumably by people who had been associated with Chadwick.
People who were interested in children.
People who had never been found.
Groves stared at the screen until it began to feel more like he was staring through it. As though he wasn’t in his body any longer.
People like Edward Leland?
For a moment, he was completely still, and then he realised his hand had started to tremble slightly. This was too much of a coincidence after the phone call last night, even though there was no reason to assume that was even connected.
Or maybe it was simply just too much.
What would you do, if you found the people responsible?
Arrest them, he’d always thought. Make them face justice. He remembered Edward Leland’s tortured, burned body and tried to feel the sympathy he’d felt previously. It was still there, but he found that he couldn’t lock on to it properly now. The emotion felt like a lost child with nobody’s hand to hold.
Arrest them.
The thought became urgent. If Leland was one of them, perhaps there were others here, amongst his associates.
Perhaps—
The door opened, Sean pushing it with his foot, a cup of coffee in each hand and a pack of crisps between his teeth. Out of instinct, Groves minimised the window. But even as he did, he recognised the guilty impulse that had made him do it, and the realisation tore at him inside. More than anything, he wanted to find the people responsible for Jamie’s abduction. But if he had a personal connection to the case, he would have to step aside; he would be made to. If anything came to trial, they couldn’t risk the appearance of bias or impropriety. He wasn’t going to be able to hide from that just by minimising a window.
As Sean put the coffee down beside him, he opened the window again.
‘You started without me,’ Sean said glumly.
Groves gave him a sad smile. The wrench he felt inside himself was almost impossible to bear, but he was a good man, a good detective, and he knew it was the right thing to do. He tried to tell himself that it was a minor loss in the grand scheme of things. He’d survived larger.
‘Yes.’ He gestured at the screen. It hurt. It hurt badly. ‘And I think you’re going to be finishing without me.’
Mark
The Devil
When I got back to the department, I saw there were a few updates from the investigation, but I went straight through to Pete’s office to debrief him on my latest interview with Charlie Matheson.
It was a precarious situation to deal with. While she remained a victim, and had clearly been through a great deal, there was no denying that we now had to consider her a far more unreliable witness than before. There was something she wasn’t telling us. At least to some extent, she was cooperating with the people we were trying to find.
As I explained all this to Pete, the frown on his face deepened. It reached the point where he almost seemed to be in physical pain at what I was telling him.
‘She’s been lying to us?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not lying. I think everything she’s told us so far has been true – or true in her own mind, at least. To begin with, I think she was confused, maybe as a side effect of any drugs they used on her. That’s why she asked for mercy at first, rather than Mercer. But she’s clearer about things now.’
‘And not telling us everything.’
‘That’s right. She’s choosing to tell us what she’s been allowed to tell us by the people who took her. She’s terrified of one man in particular. But she also wants to do what she’s been told. She wants to go back there.’
‘Stockholm syndrome,’ Pete said.
‘Possibly. I think there’s something else, but I don’t know what. Regardless, she’s not going to tell us anything she’s not allowed to, not without Mercer there.’
‘And what is she not telling us?’
‘The sins that she’s wearing.’ I explained what Charlie had told me about the reasons behind the scarring. ‘It’s connected to where she was on the day of her accident. But again, she won’t tell anyone but Mercer about it.’
‘Christ. I want an officer stationed at the hospital. Don’t worry – I’ll sort that one out.’
‘It gets worse.’
‘It can’t.’
I took a deep breath and told him about Charlie’s brief description of the man who had cut her face. While what had been done to her was horrible enough, it was what she’d called him that bothered me most now.
‘She said he was the Devil,’ I said. ‘That’s what the man told her. She was dead and in Hell, and he was the Devil.’
Pete was silent.
Then: ‘Shit.’
I nodded. Charlie had been told to ask for Mercer, and there had to be a reason for that – most likely a connection to a past case. The 50/50 Killer had always worn a devil mask during his attacks. Even though the man was dead – killed a year and a half ago – and Charlie had described the Devil as an old man without a mask, there was an obvious connection, although not one either of us wanted to contemplate. The wounds from that case had barely healed. Reopening them was going to hurt. For Mercer, in particular, it could be catastrophic.
‘Shit,’ Pete said again.
‘But then it might not be that. There are some discrepancies there, I think, and I want to look at the case again. At all Mercer’s cases, in fact.’ Pete looked so distracted that I wanted to emphasise the fact. ‘Because the 50/50 Killer is dead. The case is closed. It might be something else.’
‘So check. That’s the priority.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll get on to it. We already know that Matheson has never crossed paths with us before. But I can work through some of the old cases, see if anything leaps out.’
‘Yes.’ Pete ran his hand through his hair. ‘And then there’s the victim at the accident scene. We need to identify her.’
‘Priority number two.’ I nodded. ‘I know.’
I confess: I put it off slightly. Back in my office, I worked quickly through the various updates that had arrived in my tray first.
There was a fresh list of ho
spitals. Two thirds of them were crossed out now, representing the rapidly diminishing possibility that Charlie was simply a missing patient. She wasn’t; I knew that deep down.
The door-to-doors at the flats had turned up nothing. Nobody remembered seeing Charlie being dropped off, or the vehicle that might have brought her there. A woman who had been in the crowd at the grocery when she was found had come forward, but couldn’t tell us anything useful.
Priority number one, then.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I decided to go crazy, loading up every single investigation Mercer had been involved in for the eight years prior to his departure from the department, and working methodically through them.
There was no obvious connection in any of them. While looking at them collectively, though, it was immediately apparent that one case had dominated the latter years of Mercer’s long career. The 50/50 Killer investigation hung suspended through them, like a dirty black branch frozen in clear ice. Its tendrils seemed to touch the other cases: ever present; always active. It was there in the period of absence Mercer had taken from work following his breakdown, and it was there again after his return, eventually providing the bookend that finally destroyed his career.
However unhealthy writing a book about it might be, I understood why it continued to haunt him, and he couldn’t let it go.
I scanned through the file.
It was impossible to read it all: with all the forensic reports, interviews, statements, photographs and footage, there were over two thousand separate records in the file. The process reminded me of my first day when, new to the team, I’d needed to familiarise myself with the main details quickly. They came back easily again now. Even after a year and a half, my memories of the investigation remained as sharp as the words on the screen.
I loaded up the section on the murder of a man named Kevin Simpson. On my first day, I’d overslept, and finally met the team at Simpson’s house, where he had been found burned to death in his own bathtub. He was the latest – but not the last – victim of the 50/50 Killer. I learned that the murderer spent months following and studying the couples he abducted and tortured. He was patient and methodical, learning the secrets of their relationship so that he could tease out the weaker strands, weathering and cutting them, eventually forcing one of the couple to betray the other.
I opened one of the photographs of the spiderwebs.
A normal person embarking upon such a study of others might have taken notes, keeping pages of details about his targets, but the 50/50 Killer had an entirely different way of visualising the information he gathered. On the wall in Kevin Simpson’s study – and, I learned later, the homes of all of his victims – he had drawn an intricate spiderweb pattern. At first glance, the designs all seemed random, and yet many of the lines had small checks over them, as though they had been crossed out, one by one, severing the supporting structure of the web itself. Later, we came to understand that this was how the 50/50 Killer visualised the relationships he tested, and that the checks represented the manipulation and games he inflicted upon the couple. One strand at a time, he dissected and severed the love between them.
I skipped to the end of the file. The 50/50 Killer had died from head injuries just after dawn on 4 December 2013. Those injuries had occurred outside the house of John and Eileen Mercer.
Is this case the connection to him now?
There was no way to be sure. We had never discovered the killer’s true identity, and the official investigation had died with him. The only real links between it and Charlie Matheson now were the mention of the Devil and the patience required in both cases, and neither was conclusive. And there was another problem too – the discrepancy I’d mentioned to Pete.
I opened up the provisional timetable I’d started the other night and amended it.
Provisional timeline
3 August 2013 Charlie Matheson’s car crash
4 December 2013 Death of the 50/50 Killer
25 July 2015 Charlie Matheson reappears
Charlie had been abducted before the 50/50 case had concluded, which meant that whatever was happening here had started before that particular investigation came to such a dramatic end.
I stared at the screen for a little longer, then closed down the timeline and the case files I still had open. For the moment, I didn’t know how to pursue it.
The next thing was priority number two – the victim who had died in Charlie Matheson’s place on 3 August two years earlier. You need to go back at least two years, Mercer had said. Possibly even further. I’d go one better than that, I decided, pulling all the missing persons reports since the beginning of 2010, and then beginning to sort and work through the hundreds that arrived on screen.
It was a good job I did. Because hidden way back in the spring of 2010, I found myself staring at the photograph of a woman who looked a lot like Charlie Matheson.
A woman who had never been found.
Mark
Things nobody else could see
‘The hardest part is not knowing,’ Mavis Lawrence said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand that.’
She was sitting across from me in an armchair in the front room of her house: a small, fragile figure with her knees pressed together and her body bent slightly forward. Her husband, Harold, was standing beside her, clearly trying to appear strong and full of resolve. Stoical. He was failing slightly on that front, I thought. Dressed in old suit trousers, with his white shirt slightly untucked, he seemed hesitant more than anything, as though he wanted to reach out to his wife but didn’t know quite how any more. It looked like Mavis was hunched over something in her lap, a parcel of grief, and he no longer understood how to deal with it.
‘Well.’ He settled for touching her shoulder gently. ‘I think we do know, don’t we? Deep down.’
‘Not for sure. Not until she’s found.’
He took his hand away and walked over to the oak cabinet that rested along one wall of the room. There were trinkets on it – porcelain thimbles and bells; painted plates angled on rests – along with a handful of carefully framed photographs. Some were obviously of their missing daughter, Rebecca.
Mavis looked up at me.
‘You haven’t found her, have you?’
I was struck by the amount of hope in her voice, especially because it was obvious that the answer she wanted to hear was no. Her husband had been right: deep down, Mavis knew that the only way her daughter would be found would be dead. Until that day, Rebecca would continue to exist in a kind of quantum state, neither dead nor alive, and Mavis could allow herself to believe.
I chose my words carefully.
‘There have been no significant advances in the investigation into your daughter’s disappearance. What I can say is that the details surrounding it might have a bearing on a current investigation. At the moment, I’m not at liberty to reveal how.’
‘Oh God. You’ve found someone, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t.’
While not strictly true, I could tell that Mavis was visualising shallow graves in forests, unidentified remains, and that was a world away from what we had.
It made me feel bad for the couple again, because what actual news would I ever be able to bring them? They had both spent the last few years expecting to hear the worst. That would be awful enough, but at least if they had their daughter’s body, they could bury her and gain whatever sense of closure that might allow. But if it turned out that Rebecca Lawrence was the young woman who had died in Charlie Matheson’s place, they wouldn’t even have that. The body had been cremated two years ago, the ashes scattered in a place that would hold no resonance for them. We might never even know for certain if it had been her in that crash, just take a guess at the probability. How could that ever be enough for them? The not knowing would continue for ever. There would always be the slightest of possibilities remaining to fuel the fantasy: to keep them both chained in place, as they were n
ow.
‘I know it might be painful,’ I said, ‘but I was hoping you could talk me through what happened to Rebecca. The day she disappeared. The time beforehand.’
‘I ... I don’t like to think about it.’
‘I understand.’
Mavis didn’t say anything more. After a moment, I looked across the room at Harold, who continued watching his wife for a few seconds before turning to me.
‘Let’s go through to the kitchen, Detective.’
I sat down at the table in the kitchen, and watched as Harold Lawrence made coffee. My initial impressions of him had been slightly wrong, I thought. His wife might nurse her grief more openly, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned his own. It was there in the stoop of his shoulders and his weary gait: the sense that he was weighed down by things nobody else could see, and he didn’t know what else to do except carry them.
‘I’m sorry about my wife.’ He had his back to me, and I could see his bony shoulder blades against his shirt as he poured our drinks. They were so pronounced that it looked as though he’d once had wings. ‘Mavis has good days and bad days.’
‘There’s nothing to apologise for.’
‘Sometimes it’s like things used to be. And for a time we can both pretend. But it never lasts. It’s always there really. It comes back again. You catch yourself pretending, and then suddenly there it is.’
‘I understand.’ I hesitated. ‘I lost someone once too.’
Harold put my coffee down and looked at me.
‘Yes?’
‘In different circumstances. She drowned. I always knew she was dead, but her body was never found.’
‘Do you ever wonder ... ?’
‘If she might be alive somewhere?’ I shook my head. A slight lie, but not really. ‘I never believed that. I suppose it’s something I could never know for sure, but I always chose to go with the most likely option.’
‘Me too. Mavis ... not so much. Maybe it’s a male thing.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well. I’m sorry for your loss.’
I smiled sadly. ‘It was a long time ago now.’