by Steve Mosby
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning then. Do you remember what happened to you?’
‘You mean how I died?’
I saw Caroline flinch slightly at that, but I wasn’t surprised by his choice of terminology. It was going to take a long time to deprogramme Jamie of the beliefs that had been instilled in him over the years. His time at Cane Hill represented the majority of his life, and he had been very young when he was taken. Why wouldn’t he have come to believe what he had been told there? That was what children did: believe stories. Regardless, it wasn’t my job to challenge him about it today.
‘Yes. The day you died.’
‘I remember Rebecca.’ He screwed his face up a little. ‘I thought she was good, but she wasn’t.’
Rebecca Lawrence, who had vanished on the same day he had.
‘She worked at your nursery, didn’t she?’
Jamie nodded. ‘She was always lovely to us there. Looking after us. She liked to play. That’s what I was doing: I was outside in the garden playing, and she parked at the bottom near the road and told me she’d come to pick me up. I was really happy to see her, because it was boring being at home. My dad was out. He and Mum were arguing all the time.’
I glanced at Caroline. Understandably, she looked uncomfortable at that. Bad memories. Guilt. Grief. She reached out to put her hand on her son’s leg, but changed her mind at the last moment. I wanted to reassure her. It was highly unlikely that Jamie remembered everything from that age accurately. The chances were that this was a story that had been drilled patiently into him over time. But of course, that didn’t mean parts of it weren’t true.
‘And then what happened?’
‘I went with Rebecca. But we didn’t go to the nursery.’
‘Can you remember where you did go?’
‘An old fire station. There was a big tower, and Rebecca told me it was a game – to see how high we could climb, and who would be the quickest. So I raced her to the top, and I won. She took my photograph so I’d be able to remember.’
I was reluctant to ask the next question, but Jamie still seemed perfectly relaxed and at ease.
‘And what happened to you then?’
‘Something horrible happened.’ He frowned, as though he didn’t know for sure. ‘And I died. But I can’t remember, and God told me that I didn’t have to.’
‘That’s fine, Jamie.’
‘But I do know that’s when they arrived.’
‘They?’
His face brightened.
‘The angels,’ he said.
*
An hour later, after we’d finished talking, Jamie went up to his room, and I spoke to Caroline a little more downstairs.
‘He’s getting better,’ she said. ‘Already.’
I nodded. ‘On the surface, he seems fine.’
Which was true. But then it was difficult to know how hard the situation really was for him. Throughout our conversation, he’d seemed self-assured, but there had also been a blankness to him. However resilient children might be, it was going to be a long journey back for him, adjusting to real life.
He’d come alive most when talking about Cane Hill. From what he told me, the people there had given him a good life. He’d been looked after and treated well, and had wanted for nothing the whole time. From an earlier physical examination, there was no sign that he’d undergone any harm during his years as a prisoner there, and there was no evidence of torture or mind control. But of course, he had been so young that those things would not have been necessary. And he had been happy. As inexplicable as it might be from the outside, Cane Hill had been his world, and for the most part it had been a good one.
‘Do you recognise this man?’
I’d shown him a photograph of the Cane twin we’d arrested at the scene.
Jamie smiled.
‘That’s God,’ he said.
It was the most emotion he showed until the end of the interview, when he had asked me about Ella. Where was she? How was she? Could he see her? The bond between them was obvious. I could only be honest in answer to his questions. Ella was back with her mother, I told him. They were being supported and cared for, just as he was. And yes, perhaps one day he could see her again.
‘He didn’t recognise me at first.’ Caroline looked like she might be about to cry. ‘But he does now, I think. It’s coming back to him.’
‘He was very young when he went missing,’ I said. ‘Those early memories must be vague for him.’
‘But I think we all know deep down, don’t we? I mean, I recognised him straight away, of course, but that’s different; he hasn’t changed so much. I like to think he does know, in his heart. That I’m his mother. That he felt it.’
I smiled. I liked the idea that there was something inside us that was forever connected to those we loved, and that we’d always be able to recognise it, no matter how long the absence between us and no matter how much we changed. I wasn’t sure it was true.
‘He’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’m sure.’
She was silent for a moment.
‘They tell me I can’t see David.’
‘I don’t know all the details,’ I said. ‘But the way I understand things, that’s for the best right now. He’s been through a lot. He needs time to recover. He needs quiet and care.’
‘What about the others?’
The others.
On the evening of our raid, we had found sixteen people at the compound. In addition to Cane himself, there had been six arrests: a man we had subsequently identified as a former soldier named Warren Merritt; and five individuals who had been working illegally at the hospital. We were trying to trace other workers who hadn’t been on site at the time. The other ten we’d found that night had been residents. Jamie Groves and Ella Matheson had been treated well during their stay at Cane Hill, but the other eight all showed signs of extreme torture and deprivation. All were emaciated and facially scarred. Every single one of them was so mentally damaged that we had, so far, failed to even identify four of them.
‘Some are doing better than others,’ I said.
‘I just don’t understand why. Why they did that to them. And David especially.’
‘We don’t know,’ I said, although that wasn’t quite true.
There was still a lot we didn’t know, and the men we had arrested were not being helpful in that regard. In interviews, Warren Merritt had spoken only to confirm his name. We knew that, a long time ago, he had been a soldier and a mercenary, and that he’d then moved into enforcement work for the city’s underworld. But he’d disappeared nearly two decades ago, which was presumably the point at which he had been recruited to work for Cane. I imagined his skills and criminal connections had proved invaluable in researching sinners, following underground rumours and making connections, but beyond that, we could only guess. Either loyal to his employer to the last, or perhaps out of self-preservation, Merritt wouldn’t talk to us. The five assistants arrested at the scene had been paid to do menial jobs – cooking and cleaning, for the most part – and seemed to know nothing of the wider purpose of Cane Hill.
Cane himself hadn’t communicated with us at all. He simply sat in his cell, day and night, barely seeming to register his surroundings or attempts at conversation. On the occasions I’d tried to interview him, and whenever I ventured downstairs to look into his cell, he always had the exact same expression on his face. With his eyes closed, he looked completely serene, as though some deep battle within him had been completed, and now there was nothing left to say or do. The expression reminded me of something, although I couldn’t think what.
And yet it was possible for us to put together part of it.
At the scene, we had found various records. There were details of anonymous financial donations Cane had made to deserving individuals over the years, along with reams of research undertaken: notes on possible offenders and accomplices; investigations into unsolved crimes. We had also found a book – a bib
le of a kind – apparently handwritten by Cane himself.
My fingers had tingled slightly the first time I touched it. It was old and weathered, and the black leather cover was stitched awkwardly around the different-sized pages inside: hundreds of sheets of tightly written black script. Some of the text was compressed to the extent that it was hard to make out individual letters, so that it appeared the whole page had been coloured in, whereas in other places it was more sparse. Sometimes the words were written in a regular fashion, while other sentences flowed in circles and waves, spiralling in from the outer edges of the paper to the centre, or vice versa. Some of them formed elaborate spiderwebs.
It was a work of concentrated insanity that must have taken years to compile, and I had no doubt that it had. And within it, there were clues as to the real truth behind Cane Hill.
What there wasn’t, so far, was any mention of Nicholas Cane, the name the 50/50 Killer had given one time, and which had led Mercer to make the connection. So far, we had found no evidence of his existence at all. It seemed clear that he must have come from Cane Hill: the spiderwebs; the grudge against Mercer for taking his life. But who was he? He had been much younger than the Cane brother we’d arrested; was he a son? Perhaps, like Ella Matheson, he had been a child born to one of the captive sinners and raised in Heaven. We might never know. I thought of Mercer, and it pained me that he might not get the ending to his book that he wanted and needed. That even in death – even now – the 50/50 Killer remained an enigma to us.
‘What about the grave?’ Caroline said.
It shook me from my thoughts. ‘The grave?’
‘The body, I mean. The little boy we buried in place of Jamie.’
I hesitated. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t talk to her about it, especially when the results were not yet in. But then, she had visited those remains and mourned by that graveside, hadn’t she? She had brought this unidentified child toys and flowers. That seemed like it should mean something.
‘It’s just that it’s so horrible,’ she continued. ‘To imagine that another parent might be going through something like this right now. That their child is missing, and they don’t even know where he is, or what happened to him ...’
She trailed off, looking pained by the idea.
I chose my words carefully. ‘We’re still waiting for test results. I’ll be honest: it is possible that it’s the body of another missing child. But as far as we know, for all their other crimes, the Cane family never murdered children. Jamie and Ella were treated well. They were seen as innocents, without sins to wear.’
‘So ... ?’
‘I’ll let you know when we’re sure. I promise.’
At the door, Caroline gave me that smile again, the one that was hard to read.
‘It’s difficult,’ she said, ‘but it’s ... so good to have him back. I prayed for it, when he went missing, but I never dared to believe it might actually happen. And when we had the body ... Yet here he is. And however difficult it is right now, we’ll work through it.’
Looking at her, I thought that, actually, I did recognise some of the emotions in her conflicted expression. That as difficult as it might be to have someone come back to you, it could sometimes be the most astonishing miracle.
Later that afternoon, the four members of our team gathered in the autopsy suite in the basement of the city hospital. Strictly speaking, three of us didn’t need to be there; we could easily have waited for the official report to come through. But after everything that had happened, it felt right for us to attend.
Pete, Greg and I were standing side by side, with Simon across from us, on the other side of the gurney that had been wheeled out from the room beyond. I was close enough to feel the cold coming off it – the faintest of traces, like standing near a freezer that had been left ajar. There was a white sheet over the remains, and the items jutting against it were so small that they barely made an impression. The body might have been nothing more than a toy beneath a bed sheet.
Simon stared down at the gurney with a strange expression on his face, and I realised that I was too used to the archly raised eyebrow and the sarcasm, and that I’d never actually seen him where he did most of his work. Down here, he looked serious and respectful.
He reached out to the sheet and folded it delicately back, as though trying to untuck a blanket from someone sleeping without waking them. Fold after careful fold. The body revealed itself by increments.
By now, I had seen the crime-scene photos from when the remains had been found. I was familiar with the sight of the tiny skeleton lying on its side, curled in a peaceful pose as if it might somehow still be dreaming. In life, the remains were even smaller; an empty gurney would have weighed the same. The body was lying on its back now, some of the pale bones broken apart, its few remaining sweeps of hair dry and tense.
‘So here he is,’ Simon said softly.
He left the unspoken question hanging in the air for a moment. I glanced to one side, and saw that Pete and Greg were staring down at the body too. As Simon turned away to the counter behind him, the room was so quiet that all I could hear was a hum in the air: a ringing sound that was possibly only in my head.
When he turned back, he was holding the paperwork. It seemed strangely thin – a couple of sheets at most. Stupid, really, to have expected more. Not being a scientist, perhaps I’d imagined that a DNA test involved reams of paperwork, even though the end result came down to only a sentence or two.
‘The test proved conclusive,’ Simon said. ‘Which is to say there is a correlation between the DNA of the two individuals tested, and the chances of that being coincidental are so insignificant as to be dismissible.’
He looked down at the gurney again, and smiled sadly.
‘So what we have here are the remains of either Jonathan or Joseph Cane. Impossible to know, of course, which brother was which.’
I stared at the body, letting the information settle in my head. After we’d uncovered the history of Cane Hill Hospital, I’d been imagining a particular scenario: twin brothers, raised in relative isolation by strictly religious parents. We might never know the full circumstances, but we knew they’d grown up insular and warped, and ultimately intent on establishing their own version of the afterlife here on earth. Rewarding, as they saw it, the worthy, and punishing the guilty. One brother as God, the other as the Devil. One in charge of Heaven, the other of Hell. Joseph and Jonathan Cane.
But only one brother had been arrested at the scene. There had been no trace of the other. And while Cane’s handwritten bible had hinted at the truth, it wasn’t until now that we could be sure. The other twin had died decades earlier, at roughly three years of age, and the surviving brother had been raised alone.
There had never been a separate God and Devil in charge at Cane Hill. There had simply been both, all at once, in the same man.
We would never know for sure what his upbringing had been like, but parts of the Cane Hill bible suggested certain things. After the death of his twin, it seemed he had been shunned and despised by his mother – that perhaps she had blamed him in some way. She had idolised the dead son, and called the other the Devil. And yet he had remained devoted to her. Throughout the entirety of the bible, there was not a single mention of his father.
She had attempted suicide, and upon her return to the property had been hospitalised on the upper floor, convinced she was dead and in Heaven. Cane had been forced to visit her, but she was no longer able to recognise him. Sometimes she thought he was the bad son, the Devil; at others that it was the good son who had come to visit her. I could hardly imagine the confusion it must have caused a child that age. The desire to be loved and accepted. The fight within him; the lifelong struggle to understand: the hated child, or the good? Who was he at heart? Which was he?
And so it came to pass that He became They.
Greg broke the silence.
‘So these remains are ... ?’
‘Over sixty years old,’ S
imon said. ‘Yes.’
‘How could that happen?’
‘It’s not like computers, Greg, where everything is date-stamped.’ For a second, Simon seemed angry, but the emotion vanished quickly. ‘With skeletal remains, it’s very hard to tell. Over hundreds of years, yes, of course, you can see the difference. And there are more specific tests for shorter terms, but they’re not conclusive. For the most part, we have to go by circumstance, objects, clothing. And so on.’
He didn’t elaborate further, and didn’t need to. The body in the pit had been found dressed in the clothes Jamie Groves had been wearing when he disappeared. There had been the stuffed toy. The body had been the right age, the right ethnicity, and it had been found in a shallow grave in the woods. There had been a missing child, and there had been the need for closure. Taken together, it had been enough.
One particular passage in Cane’s bible came back to me now.
And She told Them that within the heart of each individual Man the larger battle was present, just as the entirety of the tree resides in the seed. And they asked if, between Them, They might therefore settle that nature in Their lifespan, and She told Them this was so.
And while I might never entirely understand Cane’s motivations, I remembered the peaceful expression on the man’s face now, and realised what it reminded me of. He looked like a child who had finally gone to sleep.
A boy and his Bear
‘Are you ready?’
Sasha, calling up from downstairs. We had a long trip ahead of us, and – this was just like her – she’d been ready for at least an hour, impatient for most of that time. Always prepared. She was far more organised and efficient than I was.
‘Just a minute,’ I called back.
Things were much better between us now. We’d talked, and I thought she understood. This holiday had been her idea – a week away, to celebrate our engagement properly, and to escape from it all. While I had one thing I wanted to do first, the rest of the week would be ours to do as we pleased. To leave the past behind entirely, and just live in the moment, the now.