by Helen Fields
‘Items retrieved from beneath the floorboards of the top apartment in Ariss’ building. We underestimated him.’
Connie looked away from Baarda. The light caught in the watery rims of her eyes. He didn’t comment.
‘He’s killed before. I don’t know if he’s even fully conscious of it. His delusions are convincing, but they’re also recurring, meaning that he has periods when he resets, if you like. I think I’m most worried about how he gets to the reset point.’
‘Connie, what’s in the box?’ Baarda asked.
She reached in a shaking hand a pulled out a tiny cracked skull. It sat in the palm of her hand perfectly, as if there was still life hidden deep within.
‘It’s from a baby. The rest of the bones were there, too. Tiny ribs. Little legs. The firefighter found them when he went up to look for some evidence that might indicate where Fergus had taken Elspeth and Meggy. There are others, too. He wasn’t able to estimate how many because they’re scattered throughout the cavity, but lots.
‘Fergus Ariss’ doctor identified a pattern. He’d go through several months of increasingly serious and complex delusions, then at crisis point he’d disappear, only to reappear several months later back at the start of the cycle. There was also the unidentified corpse of a woman in the late stages of decomposition, clothed, no obvious wounds. We can’t tell yet how she died. They had to pull up more floorboards to get her out. The dress she was wearing matches other dresses found in a top-floor bedroom with a double bed.’
‘He’s taking women, dressing each the same way, then killing them?’
‘Which matches the concept of the pictures on the walls. He has a generic idea of a mother or a wife, how she should look, what she should wear, only something inevitably goes wrong, and then he needs to get rid of the … I don’t know … the faulty model and get himself a new one.’
‘He’s a serial killer.’ Baarda let that sink in for a moment. ‘So, how come he doesn’t conform to any established profiles?’
‘Because he’s unlike any serial killer ever profiled before. There’s a lot to unravel, but here’s the thing. Fergus knew he needed to change his name. He asked for a different doctor each time, producing fake documents to re-register. He just didn’t have the means to change his address.’
‘So as genuine and complex as the delusion is, he’s still functioning at some level that allows him to evade detection?’ Baarda asked.
‘Exactly. He may be delusional at times, but he’s also devious and manipulative. I believe the Advocate’s Close crime scene was the start of it. Abducting and killing the homeless, prostitutes or runaways was relatively low-risk. Anyone without a community to notice when they went missing. But those people didn’t meet his needs – his standards, if you like.
‘He kept starting the cycle over and over again, each time believing he was dying. Imagine how terrifying that must be for someone alone. Going through the trauma of believing that your body is rotting, and that no one can help or will even believe you. It’s a recurring nightmare. When he found Angela, although the risk was much higher, he felt she was what he needed.’
‘What for? I get that he wanted the family he never had, but how does that help him?’
Connie shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s as simple as wanting someone to mourn him after he’s gone, then when he realises he isn’t going to die, after all, he doesn’t need his fake family any more. Safer to kill them than to allow them to return to their lives and reveal his identity to the police.’
Baarda folded his arms. ‘What else was found in the crawl space?’
‘Just bones and the body. No weapons. No personal items,’ Connie said.
‘So those people either weren’t killed there, or he disposed of their clothes and personal effects later. He must have periods of time when he’s aware of what he’s doing. So let’s start with what we do know. This property might be rural, but it has some real value on a plot out here. We should follow the money. You said he’s changed his name previously. The first thing we need to know is who he really is.’ Baarda began texting instructions into his phone.
Connie let him work as she stared at the fire-blackened lower floors of the building. It was 1 p.m. Fergus Ariss, or whatever his name was, had been gone a while. He was doing something, not hiding out. He had a purpose. The sky was boiling with fast-moving clouds, black underneath and blossoming with new shapes that hid a coming storm. It was getting cold. In moments like this she missed her colour vision. When the world was already grim, there was comfort in such green grass, the blues and browns of caring eyes, the pink of a sunset.
‘Right, some progress,’ Baarda said. ‘The house is registered to a male named Harris Povey. That’s helped us with the car, too. We have a match with that name and the vehicle description given at Meggy’s school. Povey is thirty-six years old. I had the council go back through records of previous owners, and it looks as if the house was left to Harris by his grandmother, Delia Povey.’
‘They have the same name,’ Connie said. ‘So I’m guessing his mother never married.’
‘Got that, too. Harris’ mother predeceased him. Records show that she died shortly after he was born. Looks to have been a suicide. Might have been post-natal depression, but that’ll take a lot more digging into the original records.’
‘So Harris Povey grew up with his grandmother, with no mother figure, no father. He told his doctor he’d had electroconvulsive therapy for medication-resistant depression. That fits.’
‘That’s not all. Harris Povey was one of twins. His brother, Arthur, died on the same day as his mother. Looks as if she killed him and then herself.’
‘So Harris survived. That’s a lot of emotional baggage. It’s tough growing up without a mother under any circumstances, but those …’ Connie’s voice faded.
‘But she let Harris live. He’s the one who survived,’ Baarda noted.
‘Maybe all he can see is that she chose his brother to go with her and left him behind.’
‘Is that what Xavier was, a replacement for his brother?’ Baarda asked.
Connie gave him a half-smile. ‘You could be right. Until Xavier regains consciousness, we can’t be sure.’
‘Was there nothing else inside that could give any clue as to where he might have gone?’
‘Not really. The electrics blew during the fire. The computer won’t switch on and apparently looks ancient. There are some drawers that won’t open, but I’m not convinced we’re going to find a map with an X on it that completes the puzzle for us.
‘The upper floors had their windows bricked up, though. Not just in the apartment where he was keeping his prisoners. His bedroom, too. Freaked the firefighter out for a minute. There’s a painted view where the windows used to be, crude, like a child painted it. Curtains and all. Makes me wonder if it wasn’t Harris at all who bricked up his bedroom window, but actually his grandmother.’
‘If his depression was that bad, maybe she didn’t want the prospect of him jumping out of the window. It’s a tall building,’ Baarda suggested.
‘Yeah. Can you imagine being that kid, though? He must have felt as if his very existence caused his mother’s death. Dad never showed up, grandmother might not have been exactly thrilled with the way things turned out. What a shitshow his childhood must have been.’
‘So he has therapy, it doesn’t work, he begins to imagine he’s dying. Where does that take him, ultimately, to try and rectify it?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want it to be rectified,’ Connie said. ‘We spend so much of our lives in our own comfortable sphere, where we’d do anything at all to survive. We rely on medicine, the emergency services, luck, fate. Death is the worst thing we can imagine. Only for some people, that’s not the case. I spent enough time locked up with people who felt death might be the less painful option to living that I can honestly say, we need to rethink our views on this.
‘Perhaps he wants to pass on. It may be that his particular hell isn’t cons
tantly believing he’s dying, but in repeatedly realising that he isn’t. Someone that desperate is capable of doing absolutely anything to make it stop. To make their life, in this case their living death, end.’
‘Why torch the house now if he’s been in this cycle for so long? He still needs somewhere to live. All his photos are here. He’s perfectly set up to house his replacement family.’
‘Something must have changed, and dramatically enough that he’s decided he’s not coming back. There’s a massive hole in the floorboards between the upper floor and the one below, so maybe his plans went badly wrong this time. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s decided his life is about to end whether nature planned it that way or not. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the pain any more.’
‘Fuck,’ Baarda muttered.
‘Fuck would be a fair summary at this point,’ Connie agreed.
‘Sir, we’ve got a trace on the car,’ a uniformed officer reported. ‘Last seen exiting the Edinburgh bypass onto the Straiton Road and heading south.’
‘Get vehicles down there, unmarked. Silent approach. Assume he has hostages in the vehicle. We don’t want him spooked,’ Baarda ordered.
‘Yes, sir.’ The officer disappeared, already talking into his radio.
Connie got a map of the area up on her mobile. ‘Let’s go. Harris Povey may not actually be dying, but other people almost certainly are.’
Chapter Forty
‘What’s down that way?’ Baarda asked as they sped through the city.
‘That road goes south, so it’s possible he knows he’s being pursued and he’s fleeing. Although looking at the map, if I knew the area and that were me, I’d have gone another junction along the A720 and taken the A702 down to meet the motorway. Much faster route out of the area.’
‘Assuming he has a reason for taking the Straiton Road then, he would be headed for a specific location.’ He glanced across at her. ‘Come on, Connie, your instincts have been good so far. He’s been in that house his whole life. He’s held hostages before, killed before, but he always went back there. Why set fire to the place this time?’
‘Previously it seemed as if he didn’t remember going through all the same symptoms before. He thought he was dying but didn’t – went home, life carried on as normal for a while. Maybe … maybe this time he’s had enough. Say there were some memories surfacing of the things he’s done, of all those bones. If he knows there’s a chance he might not be dying a natural death, maybe he’s going to make sure of it this time.
‘He doesn’t want to go home. Who wants to spend their life looking out of painted windows? I spent nearly a year looking out through glass with bars the other side. Even I had days when death looked like a luxury vacation compared to what I was living through.’
‘Talk me through the area on the map,’ Baarda said.
The rain began. Huge droplets spattering lazily at first, followed by a more regular shower, then the wind hit them from the side and in seconds, the water was coming at them horizontally and obscuring the view.
‘That’s just great,’ Connie said. ‘So there’s the Pentland Hills Regional Park, which looks like just a huge expanse of green with a few lakes. There’s a university campus. Straiton itself isn’t that big. It has the usual retail park, supermarkets, housing area. There’s a nursery, a secret herb garden …’
‘Poison?’ Baarda suggested.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It’s near a caravan park. That would be a good place to bolt to, but not easy to keep Elspeth and Meggy quiet and unseen there. There’s a stables. The main road runs down to Rosslyn Chapel.’
‘Of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code fame? You think maybe Harris has got himself caught up in hidden meanings and divine symbols?’
‘It’s a church. Maybe that’s what he’s drawn to. The natural venue for the end of life. We’re christened there, we’re married there in traditional ceremonies, and our bodies are blessed there before they begin their final journeys.’
‘Busy place, though. Rosslyn Chapel must be packed out every day of the week. I don’t see how—’
‘Turn right,’ Connie said.
‘How soon?’
‘Here … now!’
They turned into Pentland Road, Baarda leaning forward to peer through the rain-washed windscreen.
‘This is pretty industrial. What are we looking for?’ he asked.
Through traffic lights, past a supermarket on the right, a factory, furniture store.
‘It’s a long shot,’ Connie said.
The road began to narrow and meander. She wiped the condensation from her window with a sleeve.
‘It must be here somewhere. No, there’s the Secret Herb Garden. We’ve missed it. Go back, slower this time.’
Baarda did a U-turn and they crawled along.
‘There, on the left. Stop here!’
He pulled the car up on the verge, and Connie jumped out.
‘Connie, there’s nothing here. What are we looking for?’
‘This,’ she said, pointing at a wooden sign that bore the simple marker: Old Pentland Cemetery. ‘There’s a gate, come on.’
‘Is there any guarantee he’s here?’
‘No, but you were right about Rosslyn Chapel. Only this is really a more final resting place. A church is a place of ritual. If you were looking for the dead, this is where you’d come. If he wants to pass over, this is where the veil is thinnest between this world and whatever afterlife you believe exists.’
‘All right, we’ll take a look. But we’re going to keep low, stay quiet and at a distance. If he’s here – and I don’t see any sign of him yet – then I’ll need to call backup units to handle this.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow orders.’
They climbed the gate and took the grassy lane between the trees that led to the cemetery. Even with the modern world just a mile down the road, it was eerily still save for the din of precipitation. Their conversation ceased. Passing traffic noise did not penetrate the treeline. Connie wished she could have visited there on another day, with less rain and without the potential for a murderer to be at the end of the lane. Not that there was any indication of human life. The torrential rain had removed any sign that the grass had been recently driven on.
When they came to the opening at the end of the lane, they could have wandered into a century before their own time. The graves were spaced out in the irregularly shaped plot, perhaps twenty of them that were immediately visible. Every side was surrounded by trees. The sky was dark above them, and there was no way of knowing who was watching from beyond the foliage.
The place was empty. No bird dared peck for worms in the wet earth. No rabbit, rodent or squirrel dashed for the cover of long grass.
‘Nothing here,’ Baarda said. ‘We should—’
The shovel hit him a blow that sounded like a steak mallet bouncing off a butcher’s block.
‘Oh, holy fucking shit …’ Connie shrieked.
The man who stepped forward from behind the place where Baarda had just been standing was no ghoul. He was as real and menacing as any psychopath Connie had ever met. Baarda’s body lay face down in the grass, water beating onto the back of his head. Blood flowed in rivulets from his hair and down his neck. Connie wondered if he was still alive and – if he was – how long he had left to live.
‘Hello there,’ the man said. ‘I’m Fergus.’
Connie dragged her eyes upwards from Baarda’s body and forced her attention onto the man holding the shovel. The descriptions of him as skeletal were understandable but inaccurate. He was wire, bone, sinew, tendon – all stretched to their limits, absolutely taut – and clear through the skin, as if he were an anatomical diagram of a human. His face was dominated by cavernous eye sockets and painfully pointed cheekbones, his dermis little more than cling film holding tissue tight within. So many blood vessels had broken in the whites of his eyes that the colour of them was demonic. There were more gaps than remaining teeth, and as he
breathed and spoke, there was a fierce whistling from his mouth, as if he were a stove-top kettle about to blow. Which in psychiatric terms was exactly what he was, she thought.
‘I’m Connie. It’s nice to finally meet you.’
‘How did you find me?’
He grinned and she saw blackened gums. The descriptions of Cotard’s syndrome hadn’t done the condition justice. It wasn’t only the sufferer who believed he was dead. The man before her was doing as good an impression of being a walking corpse as she could have dredged from her imagination.
‘Never mind. What matters is that you reached me. I thought you might.’
‘I was at your house before,’ Connie said. ‘There was a fire. Did you know about that?’
‘It’s not my house any more. I don’t live here.’ He planted the cutting edge of the shovel into the ground and stood with one boot on its shoulder.
‘Here … as in Edinburgh?’
Connie looked him up and down as he considered the question. He was soaked through, deeply wet, not as if he’d recently come out into the rain. The shovel was covered in mud right up to its handle. Fergus/Harris was, too. His hands, trousers and jacket, his face and hair. He’d been in the cemetery a long time. And he’d been digging.
‘Not just Edinburgh. This whole plane. This existence. I don’t live here any more.’
‘Where are Meggy and Elspeth?’ Connie asked.
In an ideal situation, she’d have spent a lot longer on the small talk, reassuring her patient, setting up the harder parts of the conversation. But she had the worst feeling.
‘They’re going to pass over with me. We’re going to be a family together on the other side.’
‘Harris—’
‘I’m Fergus,’ he said. ‘Elspeth is Fergus’ wife, and Meggy is Fergus’ daughter. I had a brother too, but I lost him somewhere.’ He glanced around as if expecting to see Xavier sitting waiting for him.
‘All right. Fergus, then. I need you to show me where Elspeth and Meggy are. They don’t need to die for you to complete your journey.’