The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  Another silence from the other end, then, “For the TV show?”

  “No, Mark, not for the show, the owners asked us just before this business with the Harrison kids kicked off. Look, we have been running some background on the building and had no intention on coming down here and trampling all over a police investigation, but Sue Reed, the owner, asked us to come down early.” Mike paused and took a breath, then added, hoping his plan would work. “Is there any chance we can meet and speak in person, I can tell you what I know about the building, it isn’t much, and there is nothing in there that will help your investigation, not that I can see, or I’d have told you right away.”

  “Of course, you would, Mike, I know that.” Samuels cut in.

  “But I want to tell you what she told me.”

  There was a brief humoured chuckle from Samuels before he said, "You're not suggesting…"

  "No," Mike said firmly before Samuels had a chance to say what he knew he was about to say. "All I am saying is there has been some pretty weird shit linked to that place, deaths and such, things that would not normally form part of a missing persons investigation like this. I just want you to know what I know and what I've been told, so you have the full picture. You know me, Mark, I've been in this game a few years now and so far I’ve not found one case I can’t explain.”

  “Okay,” Samuels said, once again slowly and sounding unsure. “Where?”

  “There, at The Old Chapel, say in around two hours,” he checked his watch, “Around six.”

  “I can’t do six, there is a press appeal with the parents at four, the soonest I’ll be free is seven, and Mike, that place is locked down, you know that I can't…"

  “Seven is fine, and I am not expecting you to let me in, just meet me there, outside – we can talk in the car.”

  “The cordon is at the front gate,” Samuels said. “But there will be an inner one for the building, that outer one is to keep press out and people with a morbid curiosity.”

  “I don’t even have to get out of the car,” Mike said, pushing the fact as a child might a parent.

  There was another silence, this one longer. Finally, Samuels broke it and said, “Sod it, okay – give your name to the officer on post at the front, you’re there as an old colleague of mine and PI, as an advisor, you hear, nothing else. None of your spook hunting shit, if it got out that we’d let a ghost hunter into the outer cordon area the press would be lapping it up. You come on your own, too. I can’t have all three of you down there. You’re not to chat to anyone, and I mean anyone, except for the officer at the front gate.”

  “I understand,” said Mike. He wanted to correct his old friend and tell him they didn’t hunt ghosts, they investigated the paranormal and unexplained, then tried to explain it, but he didn’t. Instead Mike moved the handset away from his ear and let out a long relieved breath. “Seven PM?”

  “Yes, I’m supposed to be off at five, but you know there’s bugger all chance of that when a live job is running.”

  “It’s appreciated,” Mike said sincerely.

  “It’s only ‘cos I know you and I’d be lying if I told you you’ve not got me a little curious,” Samuels said. “If anything changes I will call you, I’ll save your number now.”

  “No problem, and Mark, thanks.”

  “See you at seven buddy,” The line went dead.

  Mike lowered the phone to his side and let out another slow breath as he turned to face Scotty who was now looking at him with earnest.

  “That sounded promising,” he said.

  “I’m meeting him at seven, at The Old Chapel,” Mike replied as he sat back down at the foot of the bed. “At least he didn’t laugh me off the line,” he added. Mile got back up, he was feeling restless and fidgety, and quite frankly a little useless that they had been sent down here and were unable to do much but sit about waiting. Waiting for the Harrison kids to turn up and be allowed into the place, waiting for them to turn up dead and – well he didn’t want to think of that. “Have we got anything, anything else to take to him that doesn’t sound crazy?”

  “We might have,” came Tara’s voice. Neither of them had heard her come in but she was now stood by the trouser press, her sunglasses pushed back on her hair and acting like a hair band against her dark blonde locks. “It’s tenuous guys,” she continued, “but I think you need to see this!”

  Chapter 25

  Mike looked at the old, school photo on the screen of Tara's Lenovo Yoga, it was colour, but that washed out colour of the 60s and 70s, the kind of colour that made you wonder if everything did look as full of browns, beiges, and oranges as the image would have you believe.

  “I don’t get you?” Mike asked, looking back at Tara who was leaning over both he and Scotty as they all crowded around the small desk that also served as a dresser. He could smell the fruitiness of shampoo on her hair and caught a whiff of her perfume, it smelt good on her sun-kissed skin.

  “That is Lindie Parker,” Tara said, reaching forward and tapping the old washed out image. “She was fifteen-years-old when she went missing. She disappeared from Charlestown in sixty-nine. There was a massive search for her, but it was as if she just upped and vanished. A week after she did a Lord Lucan, a shore-fisherman snagged one of her shoes on his line a mile down the coast. That was about as much of Lindie as they ever found, with only the shoe to go on they recorded a case of death by misadventure. From the little info there is in the old Herald records they ruled that she likely fell in the harbour and tragically drowned.”

  “I still don’t get it?” Mike said, looking at the old image. The girl in it, Lindie, was pretty, her hair was long, and no doubt bright red. The colour of the film, film that had been transferred to a very early and rare colour newspaper print, probably didn’t do the depth of the red in her hair justice. Her face looked fresh and held just a splattering of freckles that crossed the bridge of her nose, freckles that would have either faded with maturity or remained and been one of her endearing features. Sadly no one would ever know, her years cut short by whatever tragedy had befallen her on the day she went missing. He squinted closely at the old image, the only other mark on her face was a small, thin scar that ran above her right eye, likely the result of some childhood mishap. He looked away from the image and turned back to Tara, “That’s tragic and all, but that’s forty-nine years ago now, and Charlestown is a good ten miles away.”

  Tara nodded, then opened another browser window that she had minimalized in her taskbar at the bottom, this time the image was of a very attractive blonde girl, the picture was black and white. "That's Sara Capstone," Tara said. "Eighteen years old, she went missing nine months before Lindie Parker, she was from Porthpean, a little further west of here, again on the coast. Just upped and vanished one Sunday morning whilst out walking her dog. The dog came home, trailing its lead behind it, no sign of Sara, though. A week later a trawler found one of her shoes and a stocking about five miles out. Just like Lindie, they never found a body.”

  “Well those two cases are close enough in conjuncture to possibly be linked,” Mike said, as his eyes scanned the screen. “Although they are both likely no more than tragic accidents. Her dog probably got into trouble swimming, she went in and rescued the mutt, mutt survived, she sadly drowned. Happens all the time.”

  “Bear with me,” Tara said as she bought up yet another screen. This was a few years earlier again; the old Herald front sheet reported the news from September 1961. This headline read,

  MISSING FIFTEEN YEAR-OLD LISA SIMMS FEARED DEAD

  Mike scanned the story, again it was headed up with a school photo of the girl. She was a fresh-faced teen, dressed in a checked skirt and blouse that looked meticulously ironed, no doubt her mother had doused it in a little extra spray starch that morning, (his own Gran had loved the bloody stuff), to ensure it kept that freshly laundered look for her school photo. Mike guessed her hair had been brown, it was hard to tell in the old black and white picture. It was held b
ack in a studious-looking bun and a broad smile dressed her lips. Her eyes were wide and full of potential that would never be fulfilled. Lisa apparently had just vanished from the street in her home village of Duporth whilst heading home from a study session at her best friend’s house. The only trace of Lisa Simms they’d ever found was her school satchel, that, according to the story, had washed up in Charlestown harbour a few days after she went missing. There was no word from the police, or theory as to just how she’d ended up drowning in the sea whilst walking home, the distance, according to the article, had been just over a mile and her route took her nowhere near the shore.

  "Each case they have recorded death by misadventure, but to me, these seem linked," Tara said, her voice brimming with enthusiasm.

  “It's compelling," Mike said, he was impressed with what she'd dug up over the last couple of hours, and it further enforced his belief that in a different life, with different choices, she'd have made a hell of a detective. "But, these three cases span eight years,” he continued, not wanted to quell her enthusiasm but needing at the same time to reign this in. “All in different towns and villages. I’m not sure I can take this to Samuels when I see him. Our case is, as I said, forty-nine years after the last report.”

  “He’s agreed to see you then?” Tara asked as she closed the browser window and opened a new one, this was a story from much earlier, so early in fact that it had hardly any photographic images and consisted mostly of text.

  "Yes, seven out at The Old Chapel," Mike saw a spark of excitement in her eyes and quickly added, "Just me, no hangers-on and I don’t get to go inside.”

  Tara elbowed him in the ribs, as Scotty took control of her laptop, “This story is from 1920,” Scotty said with interest as he read. “It talks about missing fourteen-year-old Lucy Harper, a resident of Penwithick, she disappeared whilst out collecting flowers for her sick mother. It says here that locals found a discarded bunch of flowers in the lane just a half mile from her house.”

  “Did they find any trace of her in the sea?” Mike asked.

  "No, the news reports are not as accurate as they were in the sixties and seventies, and certainly not as accurate or intrusive as they are now," Tara said, closing the story down and opening a fresh screen, this was an MS Word document that she'd prepared. "These are all earlier reports, or mentions of missing persons in the area, dating back to the early eighteen-hundreds. I couldn’t find any records earlier than that. Every case I’ve noted involves a female aged thirteen to eighteen years old who vanished without a trace and was never found. A few reports speak of possible drownings.”

  “I don’t see any cases here linked to Trellen, or any mention of The Old Chapel, or whatever it was called back then.”

  Tara had obviously foreseen his question and she next fired up a Google map of the area. “These place names are old,” she said scrolling across the map. “Villages and towns have grown a bit over the years, naturally, but I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can with where the girls went missing from.”

  Mike looked at the dots, whilst Trellen did not feature in any of the disappearances, in a rough kind of way it did sit in the centre of the dots, but then so did a few other tinpot villages. And if all this was somehow and impossibly all linked, why? He scrunched his face up and ran a hand over his stubble, it was bordering on hobo and he’d need to shave today, certainly before he met Mark. “It’s tenuous,” he said after a long pause. “Plus, all these missing persons refer to girls or young women, not one male. How do you explain Henry Harrison?”

  Tara looked at him for a few drawn out seconds, “I can’t,” she said sounding deflated. “It’s the only one that doesn’t fit.”

  “Also,” Mike added, “all these other disappearances relate to kids who went missing outside, not from inside the home. And quite how they could all be linked when we are looking at a timeline of over two hundred years is beyond me. There are similarities, sure – I will give you that, but sometimes when we look for something too hard, we start to see things that just aren’t there.”

  “This is it, Mike,” Tara said, her voice full of conviction. “I can’t answer all those questions yet, I just have this feeling.” Mike knew “that” feeling, it was one an investigator got when they were on the right track. Even Samuels had said earlier about often knowing when he was on the right track, even if he didn’t have all the evidence yet.

  He placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s good work, really – but I don’t think I can take this to Samuels, I mean not only is this spanning over two centuries, but there's also no discernible pattern, either. I mean you get a spate of two of three vanishings over a few years, then nothing to note for thirty, then another one or two, then forty years. As I said, there are similarities in the cases, but this is a coastal region, kids go missing, kids drown. Look at any area of this size over such a period of time and you will probably find similar reports.”

  “It could be a cult?” Scotty said almost absently. He’d been sat quietly thinking and listening to the conversation.

  “That’s quite a leap of faith to make,” Mike said, turning to look at him. "I know there were rumors of SRA with the upper echelons of power, Bohemia Grove for example, especially in the seventies and eighties. And sure – yes, a few people have testified to abuse, some of it pretty fucking horrific, too. But never anything like this. Cults come and go, if this was the work of a single cult it would be one that has spanned over two hundred years, abducting and abusing, likely murdering young women for that period of time and never having been caught.”

  “You keep highlighting the fact these cases span two centuries like that's a bad thing, what if that IS the key, the thing that has always been missed by the police."

  “I just don’t want us going off on a tangent, going down the wrong path with this and drawing inferences before we’ve even been to the place, that’s all.”

  “There’s a museum of Witchcraft and the Occult in Boscastle,” Scotty said, ignoring Mike. “If there was something going on, something of that magnitude then they might have heard something, even just whispers.”

  Tara was now busy on her phone, “They close at six,” she said to Scotty, before turning her attention to Mike. “You have your date at seven with Inspector Samuels, why don’t Scotty and I take a drive out there, it’s only twenty-five miles away.”

  “I really don’t.." Mike began before Tara cut him off.

  “You said yourself that our job was to look at this from an angle the police won’t, and that’s just what I’m doing. Maybe I’ve put two and two together and come up with ten, but the cult thing was on my mind as well. Before Scotty mentioned it, but I am glad he did without me influencing him. The place looks like a chapel, people who stay there either report some really fuckin’ weird shit, or for some reason after staying there something goes wrong in their heads and they kill themselves, or worse, like that woman and her baby. What if that place was a place of worship, just not one that would ever be registered because of what they worshipped there? What they did there? I think we need to follow this up, Mike.”

  "You don't need my permission to go," Mike said with a smile. "If you have a feeling about this line of enquiry, no matter how farfetched I think it might be, you see it through."

  Tara eyed him, and he found it hard to read what she was thinking, There was no doubt she was strong-willed, he'd known that since their first meeting, and he knew that trying to fight her on this was about as futile as resisting The Borg. Scotty would like that one, he thought.

  Finally, she sighed and said, “I was just hoping you’d be a bit more, oh I don’t know – enthusiastic about what I’d found.”

  “It’s gotta be worth a look," Scotty said, backing her up. "If it leads nowhere it leads nowhere. Besides, while you're out buttering up the local plod, we will just be sat here twiddling our thumbs."

  Mike nodded, knowing he was beaten. “Okay, follow this line of enquiry through as far as you can, if it
goes nowhere, we draw a line under it and move on.”

  “Are you going to show Samuels this?” Tara asked. “I have the files on email link and PDF, I can send them to your phone.”

  “Not yet,” he said with a slow shake of the head. “It’s not tight enough to do that.” He checked his watch, it was four PM. The poor parents of the missing Harrison kids would be sitting down to a bank of mercilessly hungry camera flashes, both no doubt looking like a doomed animal caught in the headlights of a fast approaching car. Those poor bastards, he thought to himself. “You two best get moving if you’re going to Boscastle,” he concluded. “We will meet back here at nine tonight and compare notes.”

  Chapter 26

  Mike threaded his Jeep past the ‘Trellen Welcomes Careful Drivers’ sign at ten to seven that Sunday evening. The sun had begun its slow and gradual descent into the westerly horizon and orange tendrils of light were starting to trace their way through the deep blue of the sky, soon a magnificent fiery sunset would be issuing the last rights on the day.

  Mike lifted off the accelerator, slowing the Jeep so as to take in as much of the village as possible. He passed the decaying roadside shrine that marked the spot where Winns Estate Agent, Karl Banks’ life had been suddenly and horrifically cut short in a head-on collision some two years ago. Then at no more than twenty miles an hour, on past six driveways, none of the houses they served visible to him from the road.

  He knew from Google Maps satellite imagery that The Old Chapel lay like an idol in the centre of the small village, making the total number of properties in Trellen, thirteen. Soon he saw a battenburged Police Ford Transit pulled across the drive, blocking access to any unauthorised visitors. A line of blue and white chevroned Police tape ran the length of the outer perimeter wall and met with a traffic cone where it broke and gave way to the van. Then on the other side, toward the front of the vehicle it began a new at an identical cone, then stretched the length of the far wall until it met a sturdy looking oak. Whomever had fixed the second section of tape had done so upside down and the words POLICE DO NOT CROSS fluttered idly and inverted in the light summer evening breeze.