by Luca Veste
“She wasn’t there though,” I said when I was done. “It didn’t look like anyone had been there for a long time. Apparently, the son sold the place to another farmer. I don’t know who the son is yet.”
“So we know who he was,” Chris said, then cleared his throat, as his words got caught in it. He shook his head, his face filled with tension. “Is it the son then?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “That seems the best guess.”
“What do we do then?”
I turned to Nicola, who seemed to be taking it in better than anyone else in the room. “Try to track him down, I guess. I’m not sure where to start with that.”
“In the meantime, Michelle is still missing,” Alexandra said, picking at a thread on the arm of the sofa. “Have you spoken to her mum?”
“I called her just before I got back here. She’s rang the police now. She waited twenty-four hours, the poor woman. She had a key for her house and went over to check if she was home or not. House was empty. Car’s gone and her phone goes straight to voice mail.”
“It could still be the case that she’s decided to hide instead,” Nicola said, but it didn’t seem like she was believing in that any longer. “Maybe she was worried about putting her mum in danger or something?”
“I want that to be the case.” I bit down on my lower lip in order to quell the rapidly forming lump in the back of my throat. I coughed and continued. “I think there wouldn’t be another candle if that was the case. And they’re coming more frequently.”
“It’s the year anniversary in two days,” Alexandra said, and I could hear her struggle to keep her composure too. “Do you think he wants to deal with us all by then?”
“He’s got some way to go,” Chris replied, removing his arm from around Nicola and wiping a sleeve across his cheek. “There’s still four of us left. He’s taking his time.”
“Maybe he’s also going to get a little sloppy. You have to remember that we’re not dealing with the original man here.”
I nodded toward Alexandra and told them more about what I had learned, how sure I was now about what we were facing. “It’s the son. The apple doesn’t fall all that far.”
“Some things I don’t understand,” Chris said, sitting forward and allowing his hands to hang in front of him. He ticked each item off on his fingers. “One, we are forced to defend ourselves against an attacker in the woods and we learn that the reason he was out there was because he had killed someone a few yards away, right? We all think it’s this supposed serial killer because of the red candle thing. Only, we don’t know for sure, because he’s never been identified by police as actually existing. Secondly, we…erm…we move Mark Welsh’s body and then that disappears. We spend a year pretending that we weren’t all just waiting for a knock on the door because someone knows what we did. Then, Stuart is found dead. Now Michelle is missing. Both of them have these candles in their homes. Another one shows up this morning. And we’re all just convinced that this man’s son—who must have known his dad was a serial killer, by the way—has just been, what? Waiting for the one-year anniversary to deal with us all? Why wait until now? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe it’s taken him this long to find us?”
I shook my head. “I think it’s more than that, Alexandra. The whole thing is ritualistic. The thirteen names I narrowed down as being the most likely victims of the Candle Man, they all have a certain thing in common. They all went missing between October and January. You read about how important rituals are to some of these serial killers, I’m guessing that was passed down. You could be right though. It’s not like we left a lot of clues behind about who we were. It could be that it’s just taken him this long.”
“Or Stuart sticking his head above the parapet has given the game away,” Nicola said quietly, but with enough malice in her tone that we were sure of her feelings. “And put us all in danger.”
“It doesn’t put us any closer to figuring out a way to deal with any of this though,” Alexandra replied, shifting her body on the sofa and groaning to herself. “What the hell do we do?”
“I think we know my stance on it,” I said, getting to my feet and stretching my arms out to the sides. My muscles ached from the long journey. The tension I had felt as I’d looked around that farmhouse. It was taking an age to slip away, even as the feeling of being safe at home grew. “I believe there’s only one sure way to stop this. Bringing it out in the open. Secrecy isn’t helping any of us.”
“I agree,” Chris replied, avoiding Nicola’s stare as he spoke. “I’m done with all of it now. I just want it over.”
Nicola and Alexandra began speaking at the same time, as Nicola turned on Chris and began telling him what they had to lose and Alexandra backed her up. The crescendo of noise built, as everyone began to talk over each other, until we were all shouting to be heard. I stopped as Alexandra turned on me and began pleading for us to find another way out.
“I can’t believe this is our lives,” I said, then repeated myself again. The shouting stopped and they turned toward me, as I started laughing. “Listen to us. We’re supposed to be normal people and instead we’re having a serious discussion about how we avoid being killed off by someone who uses candles to choose his victims or whatever they mean.”
Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop, until I was hysterical. I could almost see myself, doubled over as I collapsed in the chair and put my head in my hands. I didn’t calm down until I felt a hand on the back of my head. I looked up to see Alexandra shushing me as she stroked the back of my neck.
None of it was helping. I wasn’t sure what it was meant to do anyway—a meeting of the four of us who were left. I was sure within a day or so, there would be fewer, as the hours counted down. We were all marked.
“We need to fight back,” Nicola said, but didn’t get much further as I stopped her with another bark of laughter.
“Fight back?” I said, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it all. “We don’t even have anyone we can fight back against.”
“That’s not true,” Nicola replied, her jaw tensing as she spoke to me. “If it’s the son, we have his name, and I’m sure we can find someone who could give us a description of him. Then there’s the bloke you met online. What if it’s him?”
I shook my head and thought of the usefulness of trying to find someone with the surname Moore. It wouldn’t take long to show her how futile that would be, but I could already see that she knew that. I opened my mouth to say so, then changed my mind. “Let’s just accept that we’re in over our heads here. We have been since this all began. We made a bad choice back then, and we’ve made a series of them since. We’re not going to fight our way out of this.”
There was silence between us all then, as Alexandra rested her hand on my shoulder and stroked her thumb against it.
“We’re never going to agree on the best course of action,” Chris said finally, slapping his knees with a crack. “I think the only thing we can do now is to stay on guard for the next day. I’ll go to Michelle’s house and see if I can find anything. Maybe try to speak to her workmates or something? See if she spoke about going somewhere. In the meantime, me and Nicola should check into a hotel. We can both take time off work, right?”
Nicola nodded next to him, but I wasn’t sure she was too happy about the idea. She was tense, I could see. A ball of anger and fear rolled into one.
“I’ll do the same,” Alexandra said, taking her hand away from my shoulder and standing up. “I’m sure they can handle things without me for a couple of days. I’m probably safe at home for now, but I want to be ready at a moment’s notice.”
I looked up at her, trying to work out exactly what she would be ready to go for, but decided to stay quiet.
We were delusional. All of us.
“That’s settled the immediate response for now,” Chris continued, getting to
his feet as Nicola did the same. He tried to put a hand on her back, but she was already moving out of the room. “We can work out what we do next later.”
I walked them to the door, aware of Alexandra standing behind me. If I tried hard enough, I could imagine for a few seconds that we were back to normal, showing our friends out of our house. Ready to carry on our lives in the way we’d always imagined.
Chris hugged me as he left, but Nicola was already out and near the car.
“I’ll make sure she’s okay about it,” Chris said quietly in my ear. He grimaced toward me when we broke apart.
I nodded in response, then left the door open and turned toward Alexandra. “You could stay, if you like? Get something to eat or talk…”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
There was a pause, as I tried to find the right words. “You should stay here,” I said eventually, deciding my need to make sure she was okay was enough to override any thoughts of awkwardness. “We both shouldn’t be on our own right now. There’s security in pairs, right?”
She didn’t say anything, but I could see her weighing up the idea and trying to decide what was best.
“Honestly, I’m not suggesting anything else,” I continued, moving closer to her now. “I just think we need to think practically here. We’re in danger. If we could look out for each other…”
“Matt, I can’t stay here,” Alexandra said, stopping me in my tracks. “You know I can’t. We’ll be okay. There’s a way out of this. We just have to work it out, just like any other problem. Everything has a solution.”
I wanted so hard to believe her, but I couldn’t make myself accept it. As I watched her leave, I came to the conclusion that had been on the periphery of my mind all week.
The only way this was going to end was with more death.
Thirty-Six
Once everyone had left, I put some music on and finally ate a proper meal. I ignored the protestations from my body and forced it down, knowing I wasn’t going to last much longer if I didn’t. The lack of sleep, of food, of normality was all coalescing to make everything around me seem a little blurred and distorted.
The partially completed map I had started since speaking to Alexandra one day earlier—was it really that short a time?—was on my desk. I liked order. Enjoyed it. My thoughts may have been running around in a dark room, crashing into unseen objects and fading away, but words and markers on a computer screen made things easier.
I knew there was something that would make everything come together for me. A part of the story I wasn’t seeing. There was suspicion inside me that was gnawing away my insides, pleading to be noticed.
A significant portion of me was refusing to see and question what had been nagging me for over a week now. I let it wander and aired the thoughts for the first time.
The son.
The father.
That night in the woods.
Stuart.
There was a phone call I knew I had to make, but it needed to be done in the right way. I tried Michelle again first. Same result as it had been all day. Instantly to voice mail. I called her mother, but she only told me there was no word and rushed me off the phone. I imagined receiving a message in the coming hours or days, just like we had after Stuart’s body had been found.
If I couldn’t find her first.
And with every passing second of not telling the police, I was giving her less and less of a chance of being okay.
That brought me back to the phone call I needed to make. I breathed in deeply, scrolled through my phone, and found the number. She answered just before I expected another voice mail to kick in.
“Hello,” Stephanie said, the grief still so present in her voice. Her brother may have been our friend for the best part of two decades, but he was her family.
“Hi, Stephanie,” I replied, hearing the strain in my own voice. I cleared my throat and continued. “How are things with you and the family?”
“You know. Pretty much the same.”
I thought for a moment, then remembered something I’d read in a book once. “I don’t want to tell you the same platitudes you’ll have heard nonstop for the past couple of weeks, but there is something I’ve been thinking about. Grief doesn’t go away. It’ll be with all of us, always—that’s how it works. We’ll never get over what happened to Stuart. We’ll just learn to live with it somehow. How long that takes, I don’t know, but it will happen. That’s what he’ll have wanted. He’d never want to be forgotten, but he’d want us to carry on.”
There was silence on the phone, then I heard a sound that made me close my eyes and pray I could keep it together. A sob, choked off. The room had become darker, until all I could see was the glow from the screen and my own hand against my face.
“Thank you,” Stephanie said, a few more seconds passing before she spoke again. “He knows anyway. He could never be forgotten.”
“He was a good guy,” I replied, then engaged in some small talk with her. Asking about the family, seeing how they were all dealing with the shock of Stuart’s death. All the while trying to find a way to attain information I had no reason to ask about. Stephanie seemed to relax the longer we talked, which only served to make me feel worse about what I was starting to think about her brother.
“I just wish I could have seen him one last time,” Stephanie said, a sniff cutting off the last word.
This was what I wanted to know. The dread of fear in the pit of my stomach. The thoughts I wanted to ignore.
I just wanted to know why Stuart had been in those woods that night. Why he had gone to see the man who called himself Peter, to learn more about a serial killer called the Candle Man.
I needed to know it was just an overactive mind and lack of sleep.
“Anytime I think about it…well, let’s just say I can’t,” I said, choosing every word as carefully as I could. I was on the thinnest of thin ice. “I can’t imagine what that was like for your family. I only know what I’ve read in the paper and that was enough.”
“It was…it was something that no one should ever have to go through. I just don’t know what he was thinking. We couldn’t even see him properly one last time. There was just… We saw a photograph. That was it.”
I gritted my teeth at the words. I wanted to feel pain. The idea that I was now complicit in making Stephanie feel these things again. To picture it.
I just had to know.
“His tattoo, that was it?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. “I just wish there was something more that would tell us what was going on in his head.”
“I know,” Stephanie replied, and her voice had changed a little. The image of her in my head changed a little in the darkness—the tears subsiding and her forehead creasing into a frown. “A photo of his tattoo and that’s all we could see. There was talk of doing DNA or something, but apparently with his ID, that photo, other…things, that was enough. And not a single note to tell us why. No last text, or WhatsApp, or email. Nothing.”
I thought about the tattoo. How easily that could be placed on someone else’s body, if you were trying to pass off something destroyed as another.
What the hell are you thinking?
“I know, I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it all,” I said, but I could feel the conversation slipping away from me. “I’d known him for almost twenty years. I guess that it’s something we’ll have to live with that we’ll never know why he didn’t reach out to any of us.”
“I get it, believe me,” Stephanie replied, her voice softening again. There was a low voice in the background that said something that was unintelligible. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but feel free to call anytime. It would be nice to keep in touch with his friends. As I’ve said, he spoke about you all a lot. He didn’t really find his way in life until he found you and the rest at university. He was a
bit lost as a teenager. Was always in a mood, didn’t have any friends really. Yet, with you all, he seemed to find his way. You should take comfort from that.”
I found I couldn’t answer properly, so I managed to croak out an acceptance and then ended the call. Sat back in my chair and placed my hands over my face, trying to work out exactly what I was thinking.
It wasn’t such a stretch to think that Stuart was just interested in finding out more about the man we had killed. The truth behind the “Candle Man” moniker. We had all gone our separate paths to an extent over the past year, so it made sense that he wouldn’t have told us what he was doing.
It seemed like the finality of the way Stuart had died was starting to make me feel uneasy. The thought of being identified by a tattoo—something that could easily be faked.
Perhaps I was simply still in the denial phase of grief. Yet Stuart’s body was identified by something that could be constructed if you needed to disappear.
I was grasping at straws, but was it so out of the realm of possibility that there was a chance they were both still alive?
There was really no hope of that, but with everything that had happened since the year before, I could almost make myself believe it.
The man from the online forum. Peter. Someone who had seen Stuart in his final days. That’s who I needed to find.
It came to me five minutes later.
I opened up his last email and found the IP address that had been used to send it to me. Then, I opened a new browser on my computer—one I tried to avoid using if possible—and began searching for someone.
Illegal searches weren’t something I did often. Never, I thought. The IP address narrowed down the search area, but once I saw the name, I knew I’d found him.
It took me longer than I’d wanted it to, but eventually I managed to get the info I needed. I was taking a risk, but I thought the element of surprise might work in my favor.
The idea that anyone could be found if you looked hard enough sometimes scared me.