by Gwyn GB
The three lads looked at each other. The atmosphere became a little more tense.
‘We didn’t know him that well.’
‘Do you know of any societies he could have been in?’
‘There’s a few, you know, mostly dining groups. The Castle Fives maybe, but like we said, we didn’t know him that well.’
The lads shifted uncomfortably, and Harrison guessed he was getting too close to the bone. He didn’t want to lose their co-operation, so he dropped the subject.
‘What was the name of the rugby coach who spoke to George?’
‘Err, that would have been Bob Enson, he’s still with the University team. We’re all in the Durham firsts now but at the time we were Freshers and in the devs squad.’
Harrison made a note to follow this up. It might be nothing, but he had a suspicion, and that told him it was definitely worth looking into.
15
It turned out Bob Enson was at work and not contactable until later on, so Harrison left a message and asked him to call. For the rest of the afternoon, he read through the original case files for Christopher Downey. The team were working hard, searching for potential connections. Apart from the fact they both went to the same college and had similar backgrounds: wealthy families and private school educations, their paths didn’t seem to cross. Seeing as around a third of Durham students went to private schools, that wasn’t a big enough link.
College authorities had been contacted and there were no records for any societies or associations, informal or formal, dining or otherwise, which related to monks. There were several so-called secret societies mentioned and the team were checking these out, but none of them appeared to have the initials of two M’s, that linked to George. If this society did exist, then it had to be new.
Once Harrison returned to his hotel room, he kicked off his shoes and stripped down to his boxers. Then he took a few of the cushions from the bed and put them on the floor, where he sat on them cross-legged. For fifteen minutes he stilled his breathing, from deep lung-filled rhythmic ins and outs, to a barely noticeable raise of his well-defined chest.
The aim wasn’t to calm his breathing but to still his mind, bring it back from the frenzy of data and information inputs he’d been soaking up today. Twenty-four hours ago they were looking for the killer of a twenty-year-old student, now they had two bodies and a potential serial killer on their hands.
The so-called ghost was clearly anything but. The big question was, were they the killer? There had been a couple more sightings of the ghost monk last night, but Harrison was seeing a clear division in the reports and victims. There were those who had seen the monk on Palace Green. Their stories were all very similar and while he couldn’t discount that some of them may have read other peoples’ accounts, or know another witness, he had a group that seemed to be fairly trustworthy in terms of witness reliability. Then there were the others, and in the ‘others’ was Gemma Barker.
Harrison picked up his mobile and dialled Sandra’s number. It took a few rings before she picked up the call, and he heard the sounds of someone playing a saxophone in the background.
‘Harrison!’ Sandra said, ‘How’s it going in Durham?’
The sound of the music grew fainter. Sandra was obviously at home. He knew her husband and son, Raff, were both very musical. He could imagine her walking into another room so she could hear him and concentrate on the call.
‘We have another body. Just been confirmed as that of a student who went missing a year ago.’
‘Oh crap. Are you making any headway?’
‘Slowly.’
‘You’ve been to see Gemma, she tells me. She called you an “imposing figure”, a term which my daughter isn’t known to use often. In fact, I’ve never heard her say it before. So how was she?’
‘She is absolutely fine. You have nothing to worry about. She seems to be really enjoying it here.’
‘I feel a but coming.’
‘I think it would be nice for you and her if you came up and let her show you around.’
There was silence on the other end for a while as Sandra tried to extract the meaning from between the lines of what Harrison had just said.
‘Are you being honest with me? Is she really OK? Has something else happened?’
‘I promise you that as far as I can tell, she’s absolutely fine. She really likes it and I think would enjoy sharing her enthusiasm with you and having your company and full attention.’
‘And the ghost attack?’
‘I seriously wouldn’t worry about that. That’s under control.’
More silence.
‘OK, I see. I should be able to get away next weekend. I’d really hoped to be able to take her up there with Sam, but it just didn’t happen. She’s been asking for a couple of jumpers that she’d left behind. I was going to post them but instead I’ll take them myself. Raff has a lot of rehearsals for a concert over the next few weekends. Sam can stay here with him, and I’ll go spend a couple of days with Gemma. Just the two of us.’
‘I think she’d appreciate that.’
‘OK, thank you Harrison. I hope I haven’t dragged you into a nightmare case up there.’
‘Not at all. It’s a nice city and you know me, I love a good mystery.’
Harrison was relieved he’d made the phone call. Sandra had taken it well and reacted exactly as he’d hoped. He shouldn’t have expected anything different. He was also glad she didn’t quiz him further about Gemma’s ‘ghost experience’. His message had been subtle, but he’d managed to get across all that was needed to be said.
With that weight off his shoulders, Harrison put on his running gear and left the hotel for a run by the river. It was a different experience to his usual riverside one in London. Quieter, fresher and alongside a river that felt more intimate and approachable in size. His energy levels were different here, too. He noticed the lack of tension in his run. He pushed himself, but it was because he wanted to rather than that he needed to. The pace of life was slower here, and it transferred to him. His mind wandered to Leo Fawcett, and then to Tanya. He’d call her as soon as he’d got back and showered.
Harrison caught sight of the Cathedral tower and admonished himself for not focusing on the job. He was here to find a killer and so far all he’d done was find another victim. He passed under Elvet Bridge and slowed to a walk. This was the area where the police believed George had been murdered and put into the boat. They’d searched but found nothing.
Harrison knew it would be too late to glean much, if anything at all, from any signs he could see now. Police officers and dogs had been trampling the undergrowth and anyone could have been here contaminating the scene. He looked anyway, just in case.
He could see where feet had trampled the undergrowth, and there was evidence that a larger object had crushed plants. Could this be where George was incapacitated? He dropped to a crouch and looked closely at the earth. There were some faint lines drawn into the ground, not long, about six inches or so in length, parallel and four of them.
His mind jumped back to Sunil. ‘There was some debris under his nails which looked like they had been scraped across a hard surface, but I’m thinking that was probably inflicted when he was dying in agony from the poison.’ Could this be where George had scratched at the earth in agony?
Harrison looked around him. Trees sheltered the river bank. If the killer had wanted to just kill George, he could have pushed him into the water to drown once the poison was taking effect, but they didn’t. They’d gone for the dramatic option of floating him down the river in a boat. His death was a statement for sure. A message that whatever he had done would not be tolerated.
How did the ghost monk fit into all this? He’d asked Toby to pinpoint on the map the exact location he or she had disappeared when they were being chased. He’d go and take a look now, but rather than retrace his steps, he’d follow the tiny lane that led from the river bank to Sadler Street. Could that be the route tha
t George and his killer had taken?
Harrison walked into Palace Green. The crime scene that was once the rose garden sat like an open sore. Forensics had finished, but the area was still cordoned off by police tape. A handful of students stood looking and talking. There was no doubting the main topics of conversation in the student bars and online chat boards. Ryan was monitoring them like a hawk. All they needed was some kind of clue as to what sort of society they were dealing with.
He arrived at the spot in Bailey Court where the ghost was alleged to have disappeared. He could see what the lads meant. Buildings rose up around him, apart from a large wall in front. To scale that you would have to be very nimble. He’d be able to do it at a push just because he had good upper body strength, but the average person, especially a female, would find it near impossible to pull up their own weight. No wonder witnesses said the so-called ghost seemed to vanish into thin air. He looked around at the windows, which overlooked the area. All had locks, which would prevent them from being opened and allowing somebody inside. That’s not to say that the monk hadn’t pre-prepped a window, but it was highly unlikely. They had been cut off from their usual escape route, and so this wasn’t where they’d expected to end up. He’d try to find out if there was any CCTV for this area and beyond the wall. See if anyone was picked up on it that night.
He’d come up with a brief profile of George’s killer for the police, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. There was very little to go on. The killer clearly had a sadistic streak, the method of death, cutting the symbols into his chest, and quite possibly the tattoo was their handiwork. They were also confident and enjoyed being the centre of attraction, and most importantly, they were a control freak. Putting George into a boat and staging him as they had took courage, or a misplaced messiah mentality. Yet Harrison was pretty sure it was another student. George would have been unlikely to have been drinking with someone who wasn’t in his age group and social circle.
His priority had to be meeting the lads who’d lived with George. Could one of them be his killer?
Harrison’s mobile buzzed. He’d strapped it to his arm while he was jogging. When he pulled it free, he saw Tanya’s name.
‘Tanya, I was going to call you when I got back to the hotel.’
‘Is now not convenient?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’m walking back now so we can talk.’
‘How’s it going? I’ve seen the story in the papers about some phantom monk who is terrorising the city.’
‘Mmh, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, but there is certainly a fair bit of histrionics going on here right now.’
‘I bet you’re loving that.’
For a moment he thought Tanya was being serious, and then he heard the humour in her voice.
‘So, any ideas how much longer you’ll be?’
‘Not yet. We’ve got another victim but don’t seem to be any closer to finding the killer.’
‘I’ve got to go to a black tie awards evening, night after tomorrow. I’d hoped you might be able to join me, but it’s fine if you can’t make it. The guy who is organising the table said he’d find someone to take my second ticket if you were still away.’
Tanya paused and Harrison thought about the image of her in an evening dress, and then of spending an evening at an awards ceremony. While being in Tanya’s company would definitely be an enjoyable experience, he was absolutely sure that getting dressed up and sitting with a table full of strangers and having to make polite small talk while they all probably slipped into varying stages of alcoholic revery, would not. Besides, he didn’t even own a dinner suit, he’d have to hire one.
‘I think that’s probably the best idea,’ he said.
‘Ok. No problem.’
He heard the disappointment in her voice and was glad that he had a solid work excuse and hadn’t just told her he simply didn’t want to go because it wasn’t his thing.
He was walking up Sadler street, and had reached the Flat White café where he’d stood with David on his first night here. It reminded him that they’d not been able to hear each other because workmen were power washing the wall. While Tanya talked about some new equipment that had arrived that day in the laboratory, he focused his attention around him.
He couldn’t see anything left on that wall. The guys had done a good clean-up, but as he walked past the opening to a narrow lane that was more like an alleyway than anything, he saw three letters on the wall. They looked simple and innocuous, ‘FFF’, but Harrison knew they could mean something that was quite otherwise. He walked down the passageway, searching on the floor and walls for any other symbols. There was random graffiti, a few different names sprayed on the walls with varying degrees of artistic talent, and the odd impolite message to the government. Then, about fifty yards along, outside a door, he spotted an area that caught his interest. Someone had clearly tried to scrub off two pieces of graffiti, but they hadn’t done as thorough a job as the power hose because flecks of paint had clung to the brick wall. If you’d walked past, you wouldn’t have noticed them, but Harrison wasn’t a normal passer-by. First, he was focusing on the wall, and second, he was trained in tracking and reading signs that the average individual would never even see.
The wall appeared to carry a random series of white paint flecks. To Harrison, he could clearly see that one was the upside down pentagram, and the other was the symbol that George had tattooed onto his body, that of what appeared to be a capital M and lower case m in the Greek alphabet.
‘Harrison? Harrison? Are you still there?’ Tanya returned to his ear as the impact of what he’d found came to him.
F was the sixth letter in the alphabet, sometimes used as a more subtle way of showing the devil’s sign of 666. The pentagram was outright Satanic. The narrow passage led to the cathedral and to Palace Green. Harrison walked back quickly to where he’d entered. There on the wall was the name of the passageway, Moatside Lane. Thoughts of the Medmenham Monks came to him. The Moatside Monks. That was it. It had to be the name of the group.
16
He almost missed the phone call from Jack, and in hindsight, he wished he had. His mobile was on silent and he’d left it charging on the bedside table while he showered after his run. He’d needed to spend ten minutes apologising to Tanya on the way back, but the conversation hadn’t gone too well. He’d not only let her down with the awards event, but he hadn’t listened to a word she’d said because he’d been concentrating on looking for further symbols and signs that Moatside Lane was linked to their killer. Tanya had asked for his advice and he’d been unable to contribute anything because he’d simply not heard what she’d said. He felt guilty for having to ask her to repeat it all again, but finding the symbols had been important.
Perhaps he could do better with Jack.
‘Harrison, your witch doctor powers have worked.’
Harrison waited for the punch line of another DS Jack Salter joke, but it didn’t come. This one wasn’t funny.
‘I’ve found Freda Manning, and she’s in a hospice just outside of Harrogate. It’s about four hours from London.’
‘Hospice? Are you sure it’s her?’
Harrison’s heart felt like it had stopped beating.
‘Yes. I’ve already been onto the home and they have ID’d her from a photograph we have from a passport. It’s definitely Freda. She hasn’t even tried to hide her identity.’
‘Which hospice?’
‘Harrison, we should go together. You need someone with you. This has to be done properly. For your sake, not hers.’
‘I’m not in London. I’m in Durham. Harrogate is about an hour from here.’
‘Are you working on a case? Sorry I should have checked. I didn’t mean to distract you. She’s not going anywhere. I’ll book us an appointment. Let’s meet up there once you’ve wrapped up what you’re doing in Durham. I’ll come up and meet you.’
‘Sure.’ Harrison replied.
Jack had interviewed e
nough people in his career to know a lie when he heard one.
Ryan had the address for Harrison within twenty minutes. Jack had been right, she’d not tried to hide who she was. Was this another one of their traps?
Why would they be luring him to Harrogate? If Freda was there, would he find Desmond, too?
Harrison sat in the red armchair in his hotel room and stared out into the early evening dusk. All thoughts of the Durham case and Tanya had disappeared from his mind. He was barely aware of his surroundings. Something told him to be wary. It could not be this simple. He wasn’t going to ride to Harrogate and find Freda repentant on her deathbed, ready to give him all the answers he’d been searching for; but he had to try. She couldn’t be faking dying, although even heading towards death he could bet the pair of them would still be hatching their evil plans.
He felt sick in the pit of his stomach. A ball of fury, which had been kept under control for so long, was starting to spin again. It might be their plan to get him to go, they didn’t think he’d be able to resist, and they were right. He would be up early tomorrow and ride straight down so he could be there at the PennyGate Hospice for the start of visiting hours.
Harrison slept very little. He kept waking every hour in case he’d missed his alarm and it was morning. In his head he’d gone over and over what he was going to say, and in his dreams Freda Manning took turns to be a cowed, repentant or satanic witch. He knew which was the most likely, and that was why the nightmares kept him from rest. Their faces had swirled around his dreams. Sometimes he was chasing them, other times he was running for his life, but not getting anywhere. The faster he ran, the more his body lifted up from the ground. He was rooted to the same spot he’d been in ever since his mother’s death, while Freda and Desmond disappeared in the distance. Free.
As soon as it was time, he got on his bike and headed out of Durham onto the A1. He didn’t give a second glance to the cathedral and castle as he left them behind. Harrison sped along the motorway, eyes firmly focused forwards, the green of the grass verge blurring along with the grey central reservation barriers. Cars occasionally went by him, but mostly he sped past them. Seeing nothing but what was in front of him.